Editor’s note: This is another in an ongoing series of articles we call “Marking History” looking at the stories behind the hundreds of historic markers scattered about the Crossroads.
Professor O.E.H. Mundt presided over a successful public school on Glass Street for 11 years, but the man is a bit of a mystery.
A thorough search of sources at the Victoria Regional History Center offered nothing complete about Mundt, but an interesting picture formed from the scraps.
Mundt came to Victoria in 1893, opened a popular school before there was a school district, helped kill off local prairie chickens, was president of the Casino Society and was once charged with and found not guilty of using “abusive language” during a fight on Main Street in 1898.
He had five children, and, in 1898, his three young sons, all apparently under 10 years old at the time, tried to convince him to allow them to enlist as messengers on U.S. Navy ships headed to the Spanish-American War.
A historic marker affixed to Mundt Place at 103 Glass St. notes that the building, once the Continental Hotel, served as Mundt’s school from 1893 until 1904.
The Continental Hotel was built in 1871 and owned by a county judge named R.H. Coleman.
Coleman was once charged with assaulting a waiter in his establishment.
“Irritated by what seemed to be systematic negligence on the part of the waiter, the accused threw a glass at the (waiter) and then chased him around the room with a six shooter,” the Victoria Advocate reported.
He was not convicted of the assault but the grand jury “also returned three other indictments against Judge Coleman for the unlawful carrying of a pistol.”
The Continental Hotel boasted “the coolest rooms of any house in Victoria” in an 1884 advertisement in the Advocate.
By 1893, those cool rooms became school rooms operated by Mundt.
“With the coming of Prof. Mundt to Victoria in 1893 another public school was begun,” the Advocate reported in 1928. “The enrollment was near 400 pupils.”
A small tuition was paid to attend.
Once the Victoria Independent School District was established in 1898, school was free for students from first through seventh grade, but those in grades eight through ten paid $2.50 a month, according to a 1968 Advocate article.
Taxes were soon implemented to cover the cost of education. Tuition was dropped.
On July 5, 1904, Mundt received a message from Houston informing him that he had been elected principal of the public schools there.
Mundt was born in Germany in 1855 and married there before coming to Texas. He died of heart failure in 1911, when he was 55 years old.
His time in Victoria spanned just over a decade, it seems, but he left behind a couple stories that made it into the town’s historic record.
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