Farmers Improvement College near Ladonia, Fannin County, Texas. (Baylor University) In 1906, a group of civic leaders put their collective minds to work and opened the Farmers Improvement College on donated land. This well-funded college, along the Sulphur River and Santa Fe Railroad just southeast of Ladonia, Fannin County, Texas, served African American girls and boys from grades six to twelve and was designed as an agricultural school grounded in the sciences. Male student

A sketch of a map drawn for a textbook yields some interesting information. Here’s a mid-19th century, hand-drawn map of the Indian tribes in the United States, as per the creator’s assumption of what was known in 1650 (the original interpretive date of 1592 has been marked out and replaced by 1650). This is a manuscript map made by the US Army, meant for publication in a geography or history textbook. Its located in the Library of Congress. Around the Red River in today’s Te

Nicholas King’s map of the Freeman-Custis expedition of 1806, with the 1976 overlay by E.M. Parker. (LSU) In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson instructed Peter Custis and Thomas Freeman  to find the source of the Red River as part of a Corps of Discovery for the Louisiana Purchase. Spanish troops stopped them in today’s Bowie County (TX)/ McCurtain County (OK) at the Spanish Bluffs. That same year, Nicholas King drew a map of the expedition’s rather short journey, which was pu