Hockaday School

Ela Hockaday gave the school away. The Handbook of Texas says that in 1942 she arranged for stockholders, herself included, to cancel their stock, turning the school over to its alumnae, Dallas and the Southwest. By 1956 a board ran it as a nonprofit. She retired in 1946 but lived in the Cottage at the edge of campus, where guests included Gertrude Stein and Eleanor Roosevelt. The Handbook says hers is believed to be the first school in the Southwest with student government, begun in 1917. Her friend Sarah Trent helped her start it in 1913.

What the plaque says

Hockaday School 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 (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 8.5 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 8.9 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 9.5 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Fair Park — 9.6 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.

More markers nearby

• Merrell Cemetery — 1.6 mi
• Ursuline Academy — 2.0 mi
• White Rock Chapel — 2.9 mi
• Cochran Chapel Methodist Church — 3.1 mi