Blackwell School

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, there's a schoolhouse sitting out in Presidio County that holds more history in its twenty-four-inch adobe walls than most buildings twice its size. The story of Blackwell School goes all the way back to 1889, when a former Methodist Church stopped being a place of Sunday sermons and started being a place of weekday lessons.

That's where education for local children of Mexican descent in this corner of Texas took root. The school got its name from its longtime principal, Jesse Blackwell. Under that modified hip roof, through that front-gabled entry, hundreds of Hispanic children came to learn, up through ninth grade.

Hundreds of them. And the building that held them was no flimsy thing. Plastered adobe walls, twenty-four inches thick, sitting on a stone foundation.

This was a structure built to last. But here's the part that'll sit with you. Students were told to speak only English on campus.

Not suggested. Told. And when Spanish words found their way out anyway, written down on slips of paper, those slips were gathered up and buried right there on the grounds.

In a mock funeral ceremony. A funeral for words. For a language.

You think about what it means to bury the words your grandmother taught you, right there in the schoolyard dirt, and the weight of that doesn't leave you easy. The school carried on that way until 1965, when it closed with the integration of Marfa schools. And then the building sat.

Vacant. Waiting. For forty-some years it stood there in that high desert air, those thick walls holding their silence.

It wasn't until 2006 that the Blackwell School Alliance formed and preservation efforts finally got underway. People who remembered those walls, who maybe once buried a slip of paper in that ground, decided the building deserved better than to be forgotten. Some places hold a story so deep it seeps right into the adobe.

Blackwell School is one of them.

What the marker says

Education for local children of Mexican descent dates from 1889, when the former Methodist Church became a schoolhouse. The school, named for longtime principal Jesse Blackwell, served hundreds of Hispanic children up to ninth grade. Students were told to speak only English on campus; Spanish words written on slips of paper were buried on the grounds in a mock funeral ceremony. The school closed in 1965 with integration of Marfa schools. The building sat vacant until preservation efforts by the Blackwell School Alliance, formed in 2006. The one-story schoolhouse has a modified hip roof, front-gabled entry, and plastered 24-inch thick adobe walls on a stone foundation. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2010