Radhost School

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Lavaca County, there's a story that starts the way a lot of good Texas stories do: with people who came a long way from somewhere else and decided to put down roots so deep the ground never forgot them. The community of Radhost.

Many of its settlers were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and from the very beginning, they understood something that a lot of folks take for granted. You want a future, you build a school. So they funded one themselves, and it opened in 1873.

Now that is not a small thing. That is a community reaching into its own pockets and saying, our children will learn. It began as a one-teacher school, and the language spoken inside those walls was Bohemian.

Think about that for a second. A little schoolhouse on the Texas prairie, and the lessons coming out in the mother tongue of people who'd crossed an ocean to get here. Whatever they'd left behind, they weren't letting go of everything.

Then came 1930, and with it a new building and a second classroom, and the school made the shift to English. Grades one through ten, all under one roof. The subjects were reading, writing, health, civics, history, and drawing.

The kind of curriculum that was meant to make whole people, not just workers. But here's the detail that really tells you who the people of Radhost were. The school year began in the fall, after the crops were harvested.

Not because anybody told them to do it that way. Because farming was the life, and the life came first, and the school fit itself around the rhythms of the land. That is a community that understood the balance between what you have to do and what you want to build.

Radhost School kept its doors open all the way to 1955, when it was annexed by Hallettsville Independent School District. Eighty-two years of children walking through that door, carrying their lunches and their lessons, speaking first one language and then another, always in a place their own people built. Some schools get famous.

This one just got the job done.

What the marker says

Settlers of the community of Radhost, many of whom were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, funded the building of a school which opened in 1873. Beginning as a one-teacher school taught in the Bohemian language, it became a two-classroom English language school with the construction of a new building in 1930. Radhost School housed grades one through ten, and subjects included reading, writing, health, civics, history and drawing. Reflecting the importance of farming in Radhost, the school year began in the fall after crops were harvested. The school remained in use until 1955, when annexed by Hallettsville Independent School District. (2007)