Early education in the area included an 1850 one-room log cabin in the Hawkins Settlement that served as both a school and church where South 14th Street in Midlothian is now; the settlement was later named Lebanon. After Midlothian was founded, a new school began there, and Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad president George B. Sealy donated block 59 at West Avenue F, also called College Street, and North 1st Street for educational purposes, where Professor William Works opened the Polytechnic Institute with 40 students. Public schools stood at the southeast corner of South 2nd Street and West Avenue H, and the campus gradually expanded eastward into what is now called the J.R. Irvin Campus. When the frame schoolhouse burned in 1893, students finished the year in Methodist and Presbyterian churches. The Midlothian Independent School District formed in 1906, and a new two-story brick schoolhouse designed by C.H. Page of Austin was completed in 1907. Before integration, African American students attended a separate campus later named the Booker T. Washington School. As enrollment grew, additional buildings included a grammar school with auditorium in 1915 and an elementary school in 1920 donated by Tom and Mattie Dees after the death of their three-year-old daughter, Dell Mason Dees. A stadium near the east end of East Ohio Street served as the home field for Midlothian Panthers football and baseball, and the May Fete, begun in 1920 by the Parent Teacher Association, became a longstanding tradition and its primary fundraiser. More than a century after its founding, the district continues to educate students as enrollment grows.