Hockaday School
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Ela Hockaday (1875 - 1956) received her early education in the public schools of Bonham, Texas. After graduating from the Denton Normal School (now University of North Texas), she pursued graduate studies at both Columbia University and the University of Chicago. An experienced teacher, she was contacted in 1913 by a group of Dallas residents with an offer to head a new preparatory school for girls and was thus able to realize a long-held dream of promoting quality education for girls in Texas. Opened on September 25, 1913, in a large house on Haskell Avenue, the school became known as the Miss Hockaday School for Girls. With an initial enrollment of ten students and four part-time teachers, the school began a tradition of excellence in education following Hockaday's cornerstones of "character, scholarship, courtesy, and athletics." Experiencing steady growth in enrollment of resident and day students, the school expanded its primary and secondary curriculum in later years to establish a junior college, in operation from 1931 to 1951. Moved in 1919 to a campus on Greenville Avenue, the Hockaday School was relocated to a 100-acre site on Welch Road in 1961. (Incise on Base) Virginia Maxson Buchanan-Smith '60 Mary Maxson Thompson '67
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Educator Ela Hockaday, trained in Texas and in graduate study at Columbia and the University of Chicago, was recruited in 1913 to lead a new preparatory school for Dallas girls. Opening that September with ten students and four part-time teachers in a house on Haskell Avenue, the Miss Hockaday School for Girls grew steadily around her cornerstones of "character, scholarship, courtesy, and athletics."
Why it matters
Hockaday's school helped establish rigorous college-preparatory education for girls in the South, a lasting expansion of opportunity for young women in Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Ela Hockaday
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ursuline Academy
Dallas, TX
In 1874 Bishop Claude Marie Dubuis, eager to bring Catholic education to fast-growing North Texas, sent six Galveston Ursuline nuns to Dallas and helped open their school in a four-room frame cottage. Ursuline Academy welcomed its first seven students on February 2, 1874, and grew steadily — moving to a large brick building in 1884, opening one of the city's first kindergartens in 1918, and relocating to this site in 1949. Generations of Dallas girls have been educated by the Ursuline sisters.
Dallas Baby Camp
Dallas, TX
In an era when American pediatrics lagged far behind other medicine, Dallas nurse May Forster Smith saw poor infants dying of dehydration and rallied her colleagues to act. In 1913 the Dallas Graduate Nurses Association opened the first baby camp in the Southwest—four Red Cross tents on the Parkland Hospital grounds—to treat sick babies and teach new mothers infant care. The camp grew into a cottage, then a Maple Avenue hospital, and in 1947 merged into what became Children's Medical Center of Dallas, one of the nation's largest pediatric providers.
St. Mark's School of Texas
Dallas, TX
St. Mark's School of Texas grew from three earlier Dallas preparatory schools. The Terrill School, founded in 1906 by educators Menter and Ada Terrill, drew the sons of prominent families with its strict, academically demanding program; when athletics began to eclipse scholarship, families launched the Texas Country Day School for Boys in 1933. After the Terrill School closed, the Episcopal Cathedral School for Boys and Texas Country Day merged in 1949–1950 to form St. Mark's, which built a national reputation for academic excellence over the following half-century.
Webb Chapel Cemetery
Farmer's Branch, TX
Isaac and Mary Webb brought their family to the Peters Colony in 1844 and within a year helped form a Methodist society—the first church organized in Dallas County. Their log Webb Chapel, built in 1846, doubled as the settlement's first school, and the churchyard became a cemetery in 1847 when the Webbs' young daughter Alice died. Generations of north Texas pioneers now rest at the site, still tended by a cemetery association.