District Information

Byers Independent School District is a public school district in north Clay County, Texas. The school was founded in 1907 three years after the town of Byers was established. Byers is a class A school in a small rural community serving grades pre-kindergarten through twelfth.

History of Byers, Texas
(from the handbook of Texas Online)

Byers is at the intersection of State Highway 79 and Farm Road 171, two miles south of the conjunction of the Red and Wichita rivers, fourteen mile north of Henrietta, and twenty miles northeast of Wichita Falls in northern Clay County. It was founded by two brothers, Anthony Walter and George Washington Byers, who were partners in a general store in Sherman and acquired over 30,000 acres of land in Clay County. There are several versions of how they acquired the land. One is that Mr. Acers, a large land owner in the area, bought barbed wire on credit with his land as collateral, and when he was unable to pay off his debt the land was forfeited to the Byers brothers. The other story is that the Byers Brothers traded their mercantile business in Sherman for the land in Clay County. However, the real establishment of Byers occurred in 1904, when the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway was completed from Wichita Falls to Byers. The brothers donated 15,000 of 27,924 raised for the completion of the line. They subdivided their ranch, laid out town lots, and established the Tree Ranch. Because the rail road went three mile west of Benvanue, many of the residents moved their homes and businesses to Byers to have access to the rail road, which was completed through the community in June of 1904. Town lots went on sale on June 10 1904. That year Byers received a post office with A. Harris, the owner of the first store in the town, as postmaster.

In 1905 Edgar P. Haney established the community's first newspaper, the Byers Searchlight, to promote the community, its school, and the "Searchlight Town Band."

By 1906 Byers was a sizable town. Its school had 115 pupils and two teachers, and the town had its first cotton gin. In 1914 the community had a population of 600, the First National Bank, a weekly newspaper named the Byers Herald, several cotton gins, cattle breeders and livestock dealers, and cotton buyers. In addition, a variety of stores included furniture dealers, jewelers, grocery and dry goods establishments, and even a blacksmith. The population of Byers remained steady throughout the 1920s, but by the 1930s it began to drop. The town was incorporated in 1940. It had a population of 427 at that time and thirty businesses shortly before World War II.

In 1943 the Wichita Falls and Oklahoma Railway was abandoned. By the 1980s only twelve businesses remained in Byers. In 1980 and 1990 the population was 510. In 2000, Byers population had increased to 517 and was one of the five public school districts in Clay County.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Katherine Christian Douthitt, ed., Romance and Dim Trails (Dallas: Tardy, 1938) Kathleen E. and Clifton R. St. Clair, eds., Littlest Towns of Texas (Jacksonville, Texas: Jayroe Graphic Arts, 1982). Williams Charles Taylor, A History of Clay County (Austin: Jenkins, 1972)