Reinhardt History Corner

From A Century of Class: Public Education in Dallas 1884-1984, by Rose-Mary Rumbley. Austin, TX. Eakin Press, 1984.

A couple of years before World War I a railroad was built northeast from Dallas to connect Garland (and other points east) with rail transportation. About halfway between the two cities the railway passed through a farm owned by Mr. L. Rein­hardt. Fortunately for Mr. Reinhardt, a whistle-stop was ar­ranged, a station built, a post office established, and a general store was also opened. The little town, Reinhardt, was located in the middle of rich farm land where the finest corn, cotton and small grains grew.

These farmers had children, so the Reinhardt Common School District was organized and a small wooden structure was built, a schoolhouse not too far from the railroad station. During the twenties, the community outgrew the wooden schoolhouse and so a two-story brick building was erected at the present site of the modern Reinhardt School. This first brick school built in the twenties served children through the seventh grade. For high school the students went to Garland.

In the thirties, the landowners no longer wished to farm, so they platted their acres into estate lots, and the Casa Linda Addition came into being. There had already been some resi­dential growth in the Forest Hills Addition, for the city of Dallas was bound and determined to cross White Rock Lake and spread eastward.

In 1939 a group of enterprising Reinhardt citizens decided that their school needed modernizing and enlarging, so with a WPA grant of $66,000 they got more than they ever dreamed they'd have - a new school.



After World War II, the area, White Rock East, doubled and redoubled in population, and so in 1946 the Reinhardt School District - which included about four hundred children - was swallowed up into the Dallas system.

There was another little farming community not too far from Reinhardt. This was Bayles. The school for this little city started in a converted barn and eventually moved into a more stable building. The Bayles School by 1946, when it came into the Dallas district, had grown to a three-room school that was located just off Ferguson Road not too far from where the pres­ent Bayles School was built in 1961.

These two schools, Bayles and Reinhardt, have spawned quite a number of others in the White Rock area: Casa View, Victor H. Hexter, Edwin J. Keist, M.T. Reilly, Alex Sanger, Charles A. Gill, George W. Truett, W.H. Gaston Junior High, Robert T. Hill Junior High, and the high school, Bryan Adams.