Wilson School
Rosebud, Falls Co., Texas

Located 4 miles west of Rosebud on SH 53 1 mile south on FM 1963; 4 miles west on FM 1671

     WILSON, TEXAS (Falls County). Wilson is a small rural community seven miles southwest of Rosebud on Farm Road 1671 in southern Falls County. In 1905 the local school had 108 students and two teachers. Two businesses, a school, and several scattered houses marked the town on county highway maps in the late 1940s. The Wilson school was consolidated with the Rosebud Independent School District in 1954. Two businesses appeared on maps of the area in the late 1980s, but no population estimates for the community were available. The population was forty-two in 2000.

Vivian Elizabeth Smyl

Year Marker Erected: 1997

     The Wilson School that once stood here traced its history to the 1890s, when entrepreneur William Anderson Barclay deeded one acre of land for a schoolhouse. Typical of many rural schools in Texas in the late nineteenth century, the Wilson School was functional in design. Built of clapboard construction and topped with a shingle roof, the building contained three rooms. Two rooms were classrooms; one for grades one through four, the second for grades five through eight. The third room was a communal room shared by both classes. Ray Hodges served as one of the earliest teachers here. During the depression of the 1930s payment to the two teachers was often delayed, and barter was sometimes used instead of money. The average graduating class was four or five students, many of whom served with distinction in World War II. In 1950 the Wilson School District was absorbed into the Rosebud Independent School District as part of the Gilmer-Aikin Minimum Standards Education Bill passed by the Texas Legislature. The school building was dismantled in 1955; only a few physical reminders remain to mark the site.