Historical Marker
Add-Ran Christian College
Thorp Springs, Hood County · Texas
Erected 1936
The plaque names J. A. Clark and his sons, but the school was chiefly the brothers' work. Randolph opened it in 1873. Addison, who had run a Fort Worth school with him since 1869, joined as president a year later. After a dispute with the developer who had offered them a stone building, they built their own. They deeded the school to the Disciples of Christ at about 1890. Addison disliked the new names, Add-Ran Christian University and then Texas Christian University, and opposed the move to Waco.
What the plaque says
Add-Ran Christian College Here J.A. Clark and his two sons, Addison and Randolph began a private school chartered in 1873 under the name of Add-Ran Christian College. Removed to Waco on December 25, 1895. Reestablished at Fort Worth in 1909 as Texas Christian University.
Where it stands
32.47278, -97.82380 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Granbury Courthouse Square — 3.0 miA National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
- Acton State Historic Site — 8.4 miThe smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
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- Chandor Gardens — 19 miA portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.