Iago Jr. High
School
is a class AA Junior High School. The staff is composed of 18
teachers, two secretaries, one counselor, one principal, one nurse,
four
aides, and three custodians. The student to teacher ratio is 15 to
1. We are culturally diverse campus with the following
breakdown:
-
46%
Anglo
-
35%
Hispanic
-
19%
Black
-
49%
Economic Disadvantaged
-
1.9%
Limited English Proficient
We have an
enrollment of approximately 230 students and are fully
accredited by the Texas Education Agency. In recent years, Iago
students have been, Duke Talent Search Qualifiers, University
Interscholastic League winners, Youth Fair Academic Rodeo
finalists, and district and regional qualifiers in athletic and
co-curricular events. |
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The local Caney
Creek was originally named Canebrake Creek for the large
primeval forest of what Texans call "cane," a native bamboo,
Arundinaria, growing to heights of twenty feet. The first
settlers burned off the large tracts of canebrake, built large
plantations, and grew sugar cane and cotton. The results of the
Civil War and the sugar cane blight ended the large plantations,
and the area was generally abandoned until 1899, when the New
York, Texas and Mexican Railway ran a branch from Wharton to Van
Vleck in Matagorda County. This opened up the area to small
farming interests.
Clarence D. Kemp
owned three and one sixth leagues of land where he set up a
mercantile store in the late 1880s. The nearest settlements were
Waterville, five miles west, and Preston, three miles west. A
post office operated in Iago from 1891 until 1900 with Kemp as
postmaster. Kemp was sheriff of Wharton County from 1914 to
1921. G. C. Mick surveyed and laid out the township of Iago in
1911, from 1,000 acres that he bought from Kemp. The area had
been part of the Seth Ingram league and was next to the
railroad.
The name Iago was
chosen by M. D. Taylor and C. W. Kemp, after the villain in
Shakespeare's Othello. The first school was organized in 1902;
it became part of the Boling school district in 1941. By 1920
Iago had two gins, a syrup mill, a blacksmith, several
mercantile and grocery stores, a drugstore and doctor, a
barbershop, saloons, a church, and a population of 200.
The 1927 Wharton
County poll tax roll lists 134 white registrants, seven of whom
were women and fifty-three black registrants, three of whom were
women.
The church was a
federation of Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples
of Christ. Each group was responsible for services one Sunday
each month and any fifth Sunday was open to other denominations.
Summer revivals were sponsored by the groups in alphabetical
order. An oil well was drilled in the front yard of the church
in 1945 and the mineral royalty financed the building program on
the original lot given by William Stafford.
In 1958 the
population was 300, but it dropped to 150 by 1964. The Iago
Federated Church was still active in 1991. The school served as
a Boling Junior High. In 1990 a few businesses still operated in
the area, and several outlying farms and oil and gas wells were
still productive. A cemetery behind the school campus was
neglected and overgrown. In 1990 Iago had a population of
fifty-six.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Matagorda County
Historical Commission, Historic Matagorda County (3 vols.,
Houston: Armstrong, 1986). Frank X. Tolbert, "Tolbert's Texas"
Scrapbook, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at
Austin. Del Weniger, The Explorers' Texas (Austin: Eakin Press,
1984). Annie Lee Williams, A History of Wharton County (Austin:
Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1964).
Merle R. Hudgins
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