DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker says about this place, right here in Navarro County. In 1899, the Corsicana District of the Northwest Texas Methodist Conference decided it was time to plant something lasting in this corner of Texas. They established a college preparatory school.
That was the seed. And the following year, that seed took root right here at this very site, when the University Training School opened its doors. The man steering the ship was the Reverend J.
W. Adkisson, a respected Christian educator, and by all accounts the kind of figure a young institution needed to find its footing. Now picture what stood here.
A fifteen-acre campus, and at the heart of it, an ornate three-story Victorian main building. In an era when most folks in these parts were still carving civilization out of raw Texas land, that building must have been something to stop and stare at. Then came 1909, and the institution grew again.
A junior college curriculum was added, and with that expansion came a new name: Central Texas College. That name carried ambition in every syllable. But here is the part that catches you, because some stories don't end the way you'd expect them to.
By 1912, the school had closed. Just over a decade of operation, and then silence where there had been learning and ambition and that grand Victorian tower reaching toward the sky. And yet the marker doesn't let you leave on a melancholy note, and neither will I.
Because the school's closing was not its whole legacy. What Central Texas College left behind was a lasting impact on the development of educational systems in Blooming Grove. Some things you build don't have to stand forever to stand for something.
What the marker says
In 1899, the Corsicana District of the Northwest Texas Methodist Conference established a college preparatory school. The following year, the University Training School opened at this site under the direction of the Rev. J. W. Adkisson, a respected Christian educator. In 1909, a junior college curriculum was added and the institution was renamed Central Texas College. The 15-acre campus included an ornate three-story Victorian main building. Although the school closed in 1912, it had a lasting impact on the development of educational systems in Blooming Grove.