Prairieview Community

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm going to tell it to you. Way out in Hale County, on land that stretches flat and wide as a promise, a community put down roots before most folks had even decided what to call the place. That's the story of Prairieview, and it starts, as so many good Texas stories do, with one person deciding something needed doing.

That person was Miss Alice Rosser. The year was 1889, and Miss Alice didn't wait around for a proper schoolhouse to materialize. She opened a school in a brush arbor, out at a settlement called Mapes.

Now, a brush arbor is exactly what it sounds like. Tree branches, shade, and determination. That was the classroom.

Later on, the community managed something a little more permanent, a one-room building erected on land bought from a man named W. G. Williams.

And that building didn't just serve as a school. It pulled double duty, triple duty even, as a gathering place for worship services and community activities. One room, doing the work of a whole town's worth of buildings.

In 1892, the community changed its name. Mapes became Prairieview. Out here the land was working land, ranching and farming, and for years the folks of Prairieview worked it and found ways to get by.

But marketing what you grow and raise, that's a different challenge altogether, and it's one that got a whole lot easier in 1906 when the Santa Fe Railroad arrived. When the rails came, so did better connections to the wider world. One brush arbor, one schoolteacher, one room on land from W.

G. Williams, and a railroad rolling in seventeen years later. That's how a community builds itself, layer by layer, out on the Texas prairie.

What the marker says

The Prairieview Community traces its history to a rural settlement which began in the late 19th century. Miss Alice Rosser opened a school in a brush arbor at Mapes in 1889. Later housed in a one-room building erected on land bought from W. G. Williams, the school also served as a gathering place for worship services and community activities. In 1892 the name of the community was changed to Prairieview. The area economy was based on ranching and farming, for which marketing improved with the arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1906. (1988)