The Cypress Creek 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 Kerr County, in a community that started out as Cypressville and later came to be known as Cypress Creek, the pioneer German settlers decided early on that their children were going to have a proper education. In 1879, they formed themselves a school district.

Now that takes a certain kind of resolve, the kind you bring with you across an ocean and carry into the Texas Hill Country. They put up a frame schoolhouse, and for years it did what it was built to do. But frame buildings have a way of showing their age, and by 1908, the community was ready to do something more lasting.

Something in stone. They quarried the limestone right off Otto Lich's property, which tells you something about how these communities worked. Nothing wasted, nothing hauled from far off when good rock was sitting right there in the ground.

And the men who shaped that stone into a schoolhouse were Charles and Otto Bartel, stonemasons who finished the job and left behind a building that would stand as testimony to what a community could do when it put its mind to it. Classes were held in that limestone school for decades. Children came and went, seasons turned, the Hill Country kept on being the Hill Country.

Then in 1942, the Cypress Creek School was consolidated with the Comfort School District, and the school's long run as a neighborhood institution came to a close. But the building remained. Quarried from the land, raised by skilled hands, and still standing to tell the story of the German settlers who decided, back in 1879, that this community was worth building for the long haul.

What the marker says

Pioneer German settlers of the Cypressville community, later known as Cypress Creek, formed a school district in 1879. The original frame schoolhouse was replaced by this structure in 1908. Built of limestone quarried on Otto Lich's property, it was completed under the supervision of stonemasons Charles and Otto Bartel. Classes were held in the Cypress Creek School until 1942, when it was consolidated with the Comfort School District. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982