Kidd-Key College and Music Conservatory

The school is remembered through one woman. The Handbook of Texas says a Methodist bishop persuaded Lucy Ann Kidd, a widow teaching in Mississippi, to take over the debt-ridden college in 1888. She opened that September with 100 students and built a conservatory, hiring European-trained teachers, among them Finnish pianist Paul Harold von Mickwitz in 1897. Enrollment passed 500 before World War I, then fell as strict chaperonage lost favor and Southern Methodist University opened. The college closed in 1935, and Sherman bought the site in 1937.

What the plaque says

Kidd-Key College and Music Conservatory Established in 1875 as North Texas Female College, a finishing school for young ladies, and operated by North Texas Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Recharted 1919 as a junior college and music conservatory; renamed in memory of the famed educator, Mrs. Lucy Ann Kidd-Key, school president, 1888 to 1916. Educational program emphasized music, literature and the fine arts. Through its many students and excellent faculty, Kidd-Key exerted strong cultural influence on the Sherman area as well as much of the nation. Incise on back: Sherman City Council at the request of Sherman Kidd-Key Club

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 8.8 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 11 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.
• Eisenhower State Park — 12 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 23 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.

More markers nearby

• Trinity United Presbyterian Church — steps away
• Site of Old Sherman Opera House — steps away
• Merchants and Planters National Bank — steps away
• Eleventh Texas Cavalry — 0.3 mi