This year’s George Kramig Award will be presented to the Columbia Historical Museum’s Rosenwald School at the December 3rd Historical Awards Ceremony at Surfside Beach City Hall. CHM Board President Naomi Smith will accept the award on behalf of the museum and provide those in attendance a brief history of how the former East Columbia school house was resurrected and became one of West Columbia’s most talked about historical points.
In addition to the Rosenwald School, other 2023 Historical Awards recipients will be Leslie Bryson of Angleton, Larry Pearl and Bob Alexander. Bryson will receive the Nat Hickey Community Service Award for working with organizations throughout Texas to maintain historic gravesites and designing monuments to honor Texas veterans, Pearl the Anne Brightwell Artist Award for sharing the history and traditions of his Cherokee heritage through research, presentations and works of art, and Alexander will receive the Dan Parkinson Literary Award for researching and sharing his knowledge of the history of the Texas Rangers through his novels, articles and presentations.
The program is slated to kick off at 2 p.m. Sunday, December 3rd, at 1304 Monument Drive in Surfside. The event is open to the public.
Bob Alexander of Maypearl, Texas, the author of 18 books, will be the guest speaker. An assortment of Alexander’s books will be available for purchase at the event. “Whiskey River Ranger” is his latest book. Alexander co-wrote the book, “Tall Walls and High Fences,” with Richard K. Alford that was published in October 2020. It is the 12th volume of the North Texas Crime and Criminal Justice Series that is about “officers and offenders” that make up the Texas prison story.
Dan Parkinson was a Lake Jackson resident who published many Western paperback novels. The historical group’s literary award is named for the late Brazoria County writer. Like Parkinson, George Kramig was a Dow Chemical retiree. A native of Sylvatus, Virginia, Kramig went to work at Dow in Freeport in 1941 and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. When he died at age 91 in 2011, Kramig was lauded by many for his dedicated community service. Kramig was the Brazosport Chamber of Commerce’s 1977 Citizen of the Year and a finalist for The Facts newspaper’s 2000 Citizen of the Year.
His daughters Sheree Jo Munzy and Kathy Lee Davis said of their father when George Kramig passed away 12 years ago, “His life was exemplified through his strengths, integrity, honor, wisdom and love. He was a man who loved his God, his country, his family and his community.”
Naomi Smith said it is truly an honor for the West Columbia museum and its Rosenwald School to be this year’s recipient of the George Kramig Award.
Some of Bob Alexander’s books are “Six-Guns and Single-Jacks,” “Dangerous Dan Tucker, New Mexico’s Deadly Lawman,” “Bad Company and Burnt Powder: Justice and Injustice in the Old Southwest,” “Six-Shooters and Shifting Sands: The Wild West Life of Texas Ranger Captain Frank Jones” and “Texas Rangers: Lives, Legend, and Legacy.” It will be informative and entertaining to listen to Naomi Smith speak about the history of the Rosenwald School and Bob Alexander discuss the history of the Texas Rangers.
This year is the 200th anniversary of the Texas Rangers. The Rangers were founded in 1823 by Master Mason Stephen Fuller Austin, “The Father of Texas,” who employed 10 men to act as rangers to protect newly settled families in Texas from the Comanches and other Indian tribes.
The Columbia Rosenwald School was built in East Columbia in 1921 for Black children to attend. It had one teacher and 28 students in grades one through eight. The school closed in 1948 and was later used as a hay barn until acquired by the Columbia Historical Museum in 2001.
The dilapidated old wooden structure was moved to West Columbia and restored as funds permitted. A $50,000 grant from the Lowe’s Charitable Foundation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation allowed the old school house to open to the public for tours in 2009 following renovation.
In the early 1900s, Julius Rosenwald, president and CEO of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee University who had been born a slave, got together to form a program for building schools for Black children in rural communities across the South. At that time, there was no consistent effort made to educate these children.
Over 5,300 Rosenwald schools were built across the South, with over 500 constructed in Texas. Only a fraction still remain and the Columbia Rosenwald School is one of only a handful open to the public today. The Columbia Rosenwald School and the Columbia Historical Museum are located at 247 East Brazos Avenue (Highway 35) in the heart of downtown West Columbia which was the first capitol of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and 1837. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The Rosenwald School is located directly behind the museum at the corner of Broad and Clay streets and is available for tours by appointment or while visiting the museum.
For further information, contact the museum at (979) 345-6125 or look online at ColumbiaRosenwaldSchool.com.
For more details on the Sunday, December 3rd, Historical Awards Ceremony in Surfside contact Thomas Hines at (979) 900-0054.