Giles Academy

The teacher's daughter is the better-known name. Ela Hockaday was born at Ladonia in 1875, lost her mother at six and grew up with an older sister in Bonham. After teaching in Sherman and Durant, Oklahoma, she was invited by Dallas residents to start a girls' preparatory school, and in 1913 she opened it with ten students and a faculty of five. In 1942 she arranged for the stockholders, herself included, to cancel their stock and give the school to its alumnae. She died in 1956.

What the plaque says

Giles Academy Early settlers, who came to this area from Giles County, Tenn., founded an academy at this site in 1859. Hired fellow-Tennessean Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday (1835 - 1918) as the first teacher, and named the new school in memory of their southern Tennessee homeland. Hockaday taught at Giles until his enlistment in the Confederate Army in 1862, and after the Civil War for several years before moving to Fannin County in 1870s. He presented a curriculum emphasizing arithmetic, reading the classics, and uses of the English language. (His daughter, Ela Hockaday, 1876 - 1956) founded the well-known Hockaday School for Girls in Dallas in 1913.) School expenses, including teachers' salaries, were paid by parents of the students. A small community center, with a blacksmith shop, general merchandise store, and church, grew up around the large log schoolhouse. After the organization of common school districts in Texas in 1883, the Academy became Giles School, District No. 4. The old log house was replaced with a frame structure in 1886. A more modern building, erected on this site in 1924, was badly damaged by a tornado in 1936. The Giles School never reopened, and its students were distributed between the Ben Franklin and Pecan Gap schools. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 11 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 19 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 19 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Eiffel Tower — 20 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.

More markers nearby

• Site of Fort Lyday — 5.0 mi
• Site of Dial Schools — 5.4 mi
• Pioneer Smith Brothers — 5.4 mi
• Amy Settlement — 6.4 mi