Gainesville State School

The school was meant to feed itself. The Handbook of Texas says the Texas State Training School for Girls, authorized in 1913 with a $25,000 appropriation, opened on 160 acres east of Gainesville with four dormitories and a superintendent's house. Girls aged eight to seventeen arrived by court order. Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith ran it from 1916 to 1925. Crops for the girls and staff were grown on 100 to 160 acres. By 1948, with 198 students, it had seven brick cottages, a hospital and a gymnasium; enrollment reached 390 in the early 1970s.

What the plaque says

Gainesville State School Authorized by the Thirty-Third Texas Legislature in 1913, the Texas State Training School for Girls opened on 160 acres east of Gainesville in 1916. Initially headed by Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith, the facility offered education, agricultural and vocational skills to girls and young women. Agnes Stephens was superintendent from 1925 to 1941. Campus facilities were added and improved over the years, including cottages, an academic building, and gymnasium. In 1966, the school was racially integrated, and in 1974, it became co-educational and renamed Gainesville State School. In 1988, the school became an all-male juvenile correctional facility. After more than a century in operation, the school continues to care for young Texans in need. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Hanging Memorial — 2.8 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 21 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.
• Stonewall Saloon Museum — 25 mi
  Saint Jo's first permanent building, a stone saloon of 1873 with rooms upstairs for trail drovers, in a town named, the story goes, as a joke on a founder who did not drink.

More markers nearby

• J. D. "Ikard" Sugg — 2.1 mi
• Bailey, Joseph Weldon — 2.1 mi
• Fairview Cemetery — 2.1 mi
• James Menees Lindsay — 2.2 mi