Cypress School

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I tell it back to you. Way out along Cypress Creek, there was a scattered settlement folks simply called the Cypress neighborhood. Now, scattered settlements have a way of pulling people together when it really counts, and what counted here was children.

Neighbors joined together in the 1860s to establish a school, and they built it the way you built things back then: logs, sweat, and a hilltop with a good view of the creek below. That little log schoolhouse stood up there and did its job. But children have a habit of multiplying, and by 1877 that first building had been outgrown.

So the community put up a new one-story wood frame building on the very same hilltop site. Same spot, new walls. One room, one teacher, every grade under one roof.

That was the deal, and it worked. The school kept its doors open, year after year, decade after decade, all the way to 1937. That is a long run for a one-room schoolhouse on a creek-side hill.

Then the years went quiet up there for a while. But here is where the story turns back on itself in the best possible way. In 1987, the Leander Independent School District built a new Cypress school right there on that same ground.

The hilltop above Cypress Creek is still doing what those neighbors decided it ought to do back in the 1860s, teaching children. Some places just know what they are.

What the marker says

Neighbors living in a scattered settlement along Cypress Creek known as Cypress neighborhood joined together to establish a school for their children in the 1860s. A small log schoolhouse was built on a hilltop above the creek. By 1877 the students had outgrown the first school, and a new one-story wood frame building was erected on the same site. Students attending the one-room school were taught by one teacher. The school continued in operation until 1937. In 1987 a new Cypress school was built here by the Leander Independent School District. (1987)