The 1936 Defender: Yearbook of Travis County Rural Public Schools

1936 was the centennial of the birth of the Republic of Texas. That year the State of Texas Legislature created a commission to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Texas independence from Mexico. Part of this consisted of placing about 1,100 statues, and granite and bronze markers and monuments around Texas.

Here in Travis County, schools celebrated with a yearbook: The Defender 1936, a yearbook of Travis County rural public schools, compiled by the students of the schools represented in the book.

The Defender is a valuable, primary source for genealogists, researchers, educators and students of Travis County History. The 348-page book is packed with hundreds of names of students, teachers, principals, trustees, etc. There is history of each school and photos of people and school building.

Unfortunately for historians, copies of The Defender are hard to come by. And though packed with information, there is no table of contents or index so finding information about specific individuals can be quite a challenge.

Addressing that challenge the Travis County Historical Commission in conjunction with the Travis County Archives[1] set about scanning a copy of the Defender and publishing on-line through the University of North Texas’ Portal to Texas History.

You can now access the 1936 Defender at this URL on the Portal to Texas History:

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1283454/

OCR Glitches

Do keep in mind that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology for old books sometimes misses words here and there. If you have a hard time finding a school try looking for a town, student, teacher, or other feature (e.g. a creek) that uniquely identifies the school. There are also parts written in cursive, or which use decorative fonts that the OCR will not find.

Here's a list of schools we know where a search for them fails; simply jump to the indicated page.

• Bluff Springs, p.200
• Centerpoint, p.88
  
• Carl School, p.299
  
• Dessau, p.88
  
• Dry Creek School, p.215
  
• Eanes, p.301
  
• Hayne Flat, p.303
  
• J.B. Norwood, 319
  
• Littig School, p.239 
• Merrilltown, p.247
• Pecan Springs, p.261
  
• Pleasant Valley School AKA Bull Creek School, p.269 
• Rowe, p.88
  
• Summitt (sic) School, p.276
  
  

Locating Old Schools With 1940 Aerials

While the Defender does not provide the location of many schools, and most of these old schools are now gone, 1940 aerial photographs of most of Travis County are available (this was only 4 years after the 1936 Defender was published) and can often be used to locate the school and see it as it was in the context of the 1940 landscape. Old USGS and county maps too can be used to locate many of these old schools.

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[1] A special thanks to Christy Costlow, CA, Travis County Archivist and associate member of the TCHC in making this possible.