The Marfa school where children were told to bury Spanish
A 1954 ceremony at Blackwell School sits within a longer history of segregated classrooms and the alumni campaign that saved its buildings.
In 1954, children at Marfa's Blackwell School put slips of paper into a cardboard coffin and buried it near the flagpole.[1] The ceremony was a funeral for "Mr. Spanish." Seventh-grade teacher Evelyn Davis had instructed students to write that they would no longer speak Spanish.[1]
The episode is documented in the school's National Register nomination, which cites a former student's filmed interview and Davis' own unpublished account.[1][3] It took place at a school built for Mexican and Mexican American children, separate from the classrooms attended by Anglo children.[1][3]
Blackwell's adobe schoolhouse opened in 1909, but Marfa's separation of students had begun earlier.[3] In 1892, the town completed a new school for non-Hispanic children, leaving Hispanic pupils in the original building.[3]
No Texas state law required separate schools for Hispanic students.[3] School districts imposed the separation themselves, a practice the National Park Service describes as de facto segregation.[3] In Marfa, that system shaped where children attended class until the district integrated in 1965.[3]
The school grew well beyond its first building.[2] By the 1940s, its campus covered five acres and enrolled more than 600 students during the World War II years.[2] Students could participate in band, sports, academic competitions and school dances.[2]
Language policy also had contradictions.[1] Principal Jesse Blackwell organized a Spanish-speaking branch of the Interscholastic League in 1936.[1] More than 150 Spanish-speaking students gathered for the league in Marfa the following year.[1] The ceremony to bury Spanish came later, in 1954.[1]
One teacher remembered an overcrowded class of 100 pupils.[1] Blackwell divided it in half, with one group attending in the morning and the other in the afternoon, according to the recollection preserved in the National Register nomination.[1]
Blackwell closed in 1965.[2] Most of its campus buildings were subsequently demolished after the school district sold land for public housing.[2] The original schoolhouse and the 1927 band hall survived, later accommodating vocational classes and storage.[2]
When alumni learned in 2006 that the remaining buildings might be demolished, they formed the Blackwell School Alliance.[2] They secured a 99-year lease and gathered photographs, artifacts and school memorabilia for displays inside the building.[2]
The property entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2019.[2] Congress authorized a national historic site in 2022; its establishment followed in July 2024, when the school district transferred the property into federal ownership.[2]
Blackwell's address is 501 South Abbot Street in Marfa.[3] Inside the surviving schoolhouse, the Park Service's 2025 inventory records a display of school desks.[2] They are among the objects preserved along with photographs and recordings of the people who studied and taught there.[2]