Friendswood

Duane's take

The official marker tells this story, and I'm gonna do it justice. Settle in. Out on the flat coastal plain of Galveston County, there's a town with a name that carries its whole history right on the surface.

Friendswood. Founded in 1895 by a group of Friends, the people the world knows as Quakers, led by two men named F. J.

Brown and T. H. Lewis.

Now these weren't folks who wandered in and camped. They came with purpose. They acquired the land from a man named J.

C. League, and they named their new settlement Friendswood. Right there from the very start, two things stood at the center of life in that community: church and school.

Not one or the other. Both. Then came 1900.

You feel that number land, don't you. The 1900 hurricane. What that storm did to this part of Texas, the wreckage it left across the land, the enormous pine trees it felled by the hundreds.

Well, the people of Friendswood looked at all that timber lying on the ground, and they made a decision. They used the lumber from those storm-felled pines to build an academy building, right here on this site, in that very same year. There's something worth sitting with in that detail.

A storm tears down, and a community builds up, using the very wreckage as the raw material for a place of learning and worship. That's not editorializing. That's just what happened.

The Friends Church, which was the only church in Friendswood until 1958, used that academy building for both worship and education. For years, it offered the only secondary educational facilities available to the surrounding area. Families from beyond Friendswood were sending their children here because there was nowhere else to go.

The school ran for decades inside those pine-board walls. The last school term was held in 1938. But the building didn't go quiet.

It kept serving as a place of worship all the way until 1949, when it was replaced by a more modern structure. And threading through all of it, from the founding in 1895 right on down, is the heritage the founders passed along. Not just land, not just buildings, but a foundation built on a single verse.

John 15:14. Christ's own words: "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you." Friendswood. The name was never just an address.

It was a statement of intent, and the people who built it lived up to it for generations.

What the marker says

This community was founded in 1895 by a group of Friends (Quakers) led by F. J. Brown and t. H. Lewis. They acquired the land from J. C. League and named the settlement Friendswood. From the very beginning, church and school were central to the life of this community. In 1900 an academy building was built on this site, with lumber from huge pine trees felled by the 1900 hurricane. The Friends Church, which until 1958 was the only church in the community, used the academy building for both worship and education. In the early years it provided the only secondary educational facilities for the surrounding area. The last school term was held in 1938, but the building continued to be used for worship until 1949 when it was replaced by a more modern structure. The heritage of this community, received from its founders, is based on Christ's words, "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you." John 15.14