Site of Hockaday Homestead
Pecan Gap, Fannin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
After a noted career as an educator and founder of Giles Academy (4 mi. east), Virginia-born Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday (1835-1918) bought more than 280 acres in this area in 1870. He farmed the land and built and operated a cotton gin. He later sold much of the property but maintained an eighty-acre homestead on this site for his wife Maria and their seven children. Following Maria's death in 1881, he married Misouri Bird in 1892. Hockaday sold his property to Laurence Pickard in 1916 and moved to Ladonia (4.5 mi. west) where he spent the remaining two years of his life. Pickard moved the Hockaday house in 1921 and divided it into rent houses for the farm's employees. Although the house itself is gone, the existing barn was constructed from Hockaday's cotton gin. T. H. B. Hockaday's youngest child, Ela (1875-1956), followed her father's footsteps into education. In 1913, at the peak of a teaching career that began at age eighteen, she established the Hockaday School in Dallas. In the thirty-three years she was with the institution, the Hockaday School earned national recognition as an excellent college preparatory school for girls. Ela Hockaday was instrumental in the founding of the Hockaday Alumnae Association which continues to carry on the Hockaday tradition. (1981, 1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Virginia-born educator Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday bought hundreds of acres in Fannin County in 1870, farming the land and running a cotton gin whose timbers later became the surviving barn. His youngest daughter Ela grew up in his footsteps and in 1913 founded the Hockaday School in Dallas, which won national standing as a college-preparatory school for girls. From this rural homestead ran a thread connecting frontier farming to one of Texas's most respected educational institutions.
Why it matters
It links the everyday labor of a post–Civil War Texas farm family to the rise of rigorous women's education, a field where Ela Hockaday became a national figure.
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Related people
- · Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday
- · Ela Hockaday
Related events
- · Founding of the Hockaday School
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Giles Academy
Ben Franklin, TX
Settlers from Giles County, Tennessee founded this academy in 1859 and named it for the homeland they had left, hiring fellow Tennessean Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday as its first teacher. Parents paid the bills, and a small community with a store, blacksmith, and church grew up around the log schoolhouse. Hockaday's daughter Ela, born here, would go on to found the celebrated Hockaday School for Girls in Dallas in 1913.
Carlton College
Bonham, TX
Chartered in 1881, Carlton College grew from a school the English-born Disciples of Christ minister Charles Carlton had led in Bonham since 1867. Carlton, his wife Sallie, and several of their children taught the classes, opening the doors to all young people who showed a sincere desire to learn, though the school became all-female in 1887. By Carlton's death in 1902 some 3,600 pupils had passed through his Bonham schools; the college later merged away and its graduates were eventually adopted into the alumni of Texas Christian University.
First United Methodist Church of Bonham
Bonham, TX
Founded in 1844 in the Republic of Texas by circuit rider James H. Graham, this Methodist congregation first met in a shared log cabin alongside Baptists and Presbyterians, its charter members including Bonham's founder Bailey English. Over the decades it built and rebuilt through fire and growth. Its Women's Missionary Society, organized in 1887, sent lifelong member Lelia Roberts and her sister Martha to run a mission school in Mexico for 44 years.
Site of Dial Schools
Dial, TX
From 1840 a log cabin here served as school, church, and community hall, while the Dial family's cotton gin and grist mill drew settlers. By 1880 the community had a post office and an academy that won renown under Confederate veteran and educator Robert W. Lane. Among the later teachers, in 1903–05, was a young Sam Rayburn, who went on to serve nearly half a century in Congress and set a record as Speaker of the House.