Azle Schools

Duane's take

Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now settle in, because this one goes back a good ways. We're talkin' the 1850s, when a pioneer settler by the name of J.G.

Reynolds (according to local tradition, mind you) started the very first area school out here. Picture that for a moment. No brick buildings, no gymnasium, no cafeteria serving mystery meat on Fridays.

Early classes were held in log cabins, and when they needed a little more room, they borrowed space inside the Ash Creek Baptist Church building. That was the classroom. That was it.

And somehow, children learned. Now, the road wasn't smooth; it never is out here in Texas, and it wasn't then either. Indian attacks interrupted things.

The Civil War interrupted things. You'd think that combination might've finished the whole enterprise off right there. But it didn't.

Because what happened instead was something that tells you everything you need to know about this corner of Tarrant County. The Azle Schools grew. They grew through consolidation: pulling in nearby schools one by one, schools with names that sound like chapters out of an old hymnal or a frontier dream.

Promised Land. Steele. Slover.

Sabathany. Liberty. Briar.

Bluff Springs. And then there was a local college, started by a man named William Lipscomb, folded into that same growing story. By the 1950s, Azle had become an independent district, standing on its own, carrying all those names, all those log cabin lessons, all that hard-won persistence forward.

The marker calls it a reminder of the community's pioneer heritage. I'd call it something more than that. I'd call it a school system that refused, flat out refused, to quit.

And in Texas, that counts for a lot.

What the marker says

According to local tradition, pioneer settler J.G. Reynolds started the first area school in the 1850s. Early classes were held in log cabins and in the Ash Creek Baptist Church building. Despite interruptions caused by Indian attacks and the Civil War, the Azle Schools grew through consolidation with such nearby schools as Promised Land, Steele, Slover, Sabathany, Liberty, Briar, Bluff Springs and a local college started by William Lipscomb. An independent district since the 1950s, the Azle school system serves as a reminder of the community's pioneer heritage. (1982)