Art Schoolhouse

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in Mason County, there's a building that has lived more than one life, and maybe that's fitting for a place that's seen this much of Texas history. The Art Schoolhouse.

Let's talk about it. It starts, as so many stories do, with loss. Back in 1858, the pioneers of this area had themselves a church and school structure.

One building doing double duty, the way frontier communities had to make things work. But fire has a way of settling those arrangements, and that 1858 structure burned. Gone.

Now, you might expect a community like that to pack it in, move on, find somewhere else to be. But these were Mason County pioneers, and what they did instead was build again. In 1875, they raised a new structure out of native stone and lumber, right there in the same area.

And this time it went up as the second Methodist church the region had known. Native stone and lumber, hauled and cut and fitted together by the people who needed it. That building stood.

It stood through the decades when the congregation used it as a church. It stood into the 1890s, when its role shifted and it became used solely as a school. Around 1938, someone went and plastered right over all those exposed rocks, so the old stone walls are still in there, underneath, quiet and patient.

The school kept going, kept teaching Mason County children, all the way through 1945. That was the year all the schools of Mason County consolidated, and the Art Schoolhouse's days as a classroom came to a close. But here's the thing about a building made by pioneers out of native stone.

It doesn't just sit there waiting to be forgotten. Today it serves as the center for the Art Community Club. One structure.

A church, then a school, and now a gathering place for a community that still finds use for what its predecessors built. That 1858 fire took one building. What replaced it in 1875 is still standing.

What the marker says

Originally this was the area's second Methodist church. Built of native stone and lumber by the pioneers in 1875, after a fire destroyed an 1858 church and school structure. Rocks were plastered over about 1938. After the 1890s this building was used solely as a school until 1945, when all the schools of Mason County consolidated. Now this building is used as the center for the Art Community Club. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1968