Site of the Jones School House

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Jones School House site, out in Houston County. Now, a hundred yards to the west of where you're standin', something happened that doesn't look like much anymore. Just a well.

Sixty-three feet deep, rock bottom, still sitting right where it was dug. But that well is the last witness to a place where two full generations of Texas children learned to read, write, and figure. It started with land.

John Jesse Jones, born in 1820, died in 1872, gave the ground. He and his wife Margaret Kyle, born in 1830, died in 1896, had made the journey from Alabama to Texas sometime in the 1850s. They put down roots in Houston County, and on the land John Jesse gave, something modest and essential took shape.

In the 1860s, a one-room log cabin went up. One room. Log walls.

And inside, a teacher's platform and hand-hewn benches, peg-leg log benches, cut and fitted by hand. That was the Jones School House. It was also a church.

Also a meeting place for the community. One room doing the work of several, the way things had to be done out here. Two generations of children came through that door.

Two generations sat on those hand-hewn benches and wrestled with letters and numbers and ideas. And then, after 1900, the school was moved. About a mile and a half northeast, into the woods.

Enlarged, the way a growing community needs things to grow. It ran on for decades more, until 1933, when it was consolidated with Latexo. And the cabin?

Gone. The benches? Gone.

The teacher's platform, the log walls, all of it, gone. But sixty-three feet straight down, through rock, that well is still there. Standing in for everything else.

Sometimes the last thing left is the one that tells you exactly where to look.

What the marker says

(100 yards west) On land given by John Jesse Jones (1820-1872), who with his wife Margaret Kyle (1830-1896) moved from Alabama to Texas in the 1850s. The 1860s one-room log cabin school house was used also for church and community meetings. It was furnished with teacher's platform and hand-hewn, peg-leg log benches. Two generations of children learned to read, write and figure here, before school was moved after 1900 into the woods about 1.5 miles northeast, and enlarged. It was consolidated with Latexo in 1933. A 63-foot well with rock bottom remains to mark site of Jones School. (1973)