Bartlett Grammar School

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Bartlett Grammar School, over in Bell County. Now settle in, because this is a story about a town that kept outgrowing itself, and what happens when a community decides to do something about it. By the early nineteen hundreds, Bartlett had made itself into the railroad center of a prosperous cotton growing region.

That's no small thing. Cotton meant money, money meant people, and people meant children, and children meant you needed somewhere to put them all. So in 1903, the Bartlett Independent School District was created.

Good start. Solid foundation. Seemed like enough at the time.

But Bartlett had a habit of growing faster than its own plans could keep up with. By 1906 and 1907, the five-room schoolhouse standing on this very site had proved inadequate to house the district's expanding student enrollment. Five rooms, and it just wasn't cutting it anymore.

Now here's where the story gets interesting, because Bartlett didn't shrug and make do. The town enlarged the district's tax base, passed a bond election, and got to work. They brought in a noted Austin architect by the name of A.

O. Watson, and what Watson designed was no modest patch job. By 1908 and 1909, a brand new multi-wing brick building was standing right here.

Multi-wing. Brick. That's a town making a statement.

Then came 1917, and a new high school was erected, and this building, this fine Watson-designed structure, became an elementary and grammar school. It had found its purpose. And it held that purpose for decades, serving the children of Bartlett through all the seasons that cotton country can throw at you.

The school closed in 1988. After all that growing and building and bond-passing and outgrowing, the doors finally went quiet. But the building still stands here as a marker of what a prosperous cotton town once decided its children were worth.

What the marker says

By the early 1900s Bartlett had become the railroad center of a prosperous cotton growing region. In 1903 the Bartlett Independent School District was created. By 1906-07 the 5-room schoolhouse here proved inadequate to house the district's expanding student enrollment. Bartlett enlarged the district's tax base and passed a bond election, and in 1908-09 a new multi-wing brick building, designed by noted Austin architect A.O. Watson, was built here. When a new high school was erected in 1917, the facility at this site became an elementary/grammar school. The school closed in 1988. (1994)