Goose Creek School Community No. 9 emerged after Texas's 1876 constitution and school law replaced earlier school districts with school communities in Harris County for children ages 8 to 14 during a four-month school year. Created on November 22, 1876, it received one and a half acres from Mary Smith McCrory Jones, widow of Anson Jones, the last President of Texas, for a public school. Parents and friends of the fourteen students in the first class funded and built the small wood plank schoolhouse locally known as the Briar Patch School, with two rows of homemade benches, a teacher's desk, and books donated by Cedar Bayou Methodist Church. Classes met there through 1896, when the building was moved to land behind today's George Washington Carver Elementary School. From 1897 until sometime after 1900, it served as the first public school for African American children in Goose Creek. After oil was discovered, oil field and refinery workers and their families moved into the area through the late 1910s, sharply increasing enrollment, prompting repairs to the old schoolhouse and the renting and construction of other buildings for classes. A 1922 school bond financed several new schools, and by 1923 the old schoolhouse was no longer in use, standing as the beginning of public education in Goose Creek.