Ursuline Academy

The Dallas school gained legal standing quickly. The Handbook of Texas says the Legislature chartered Ursuline Academy with collegiate rights and privileges in 1876, only two years after six Ursulines from Galveston opened it on February 2, 1874. After moving four times, the school bought a nine-acre tract in East Dallas in 1880, and a cornerstone was laid there in 1882 for a building not finished until 1907. An alumnae and ex-students association formed in 1899. The sisters followed the tradition of Angela Merici, who founded the first Ursuline community in 1535.

What the plaque says

Ursuline Academy Bishop Claude Marie Dubuis, wishing to establish a Catholic school in the rapidly-growing area of North Texas, assigned six Galveston-based Ursuline nuns to the task in 1874. In January of that year Bishop Dubuis traveled with the sisters to Dallas and assisted them in opening the school. The first facility available to the new academy was a small four-room frame cottage located near Sacred Heart Church in downtown Dallas. The church's pastor, Father Joseph Martiniere, worked closely with the nuns in establishing the school, which officially opened on February 2, 1874, with seven students. As enrollment grew, plans were made to build a larger facility. In 1884 the school moved out of the downtown area to a new brick building located at Bryan, Haskell, and Live Oak streets. That building served the academy until 1949, when the school relocated to this site. Generations of Dallas girls have attended Ursuline Academy. One of the city's first kindergartens opened as part of the academy's program in 1918. Its grammar school section was discontinued in 1976, and the emphasis after that time was placed on high school education. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 6.5 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 — 6.9 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 — 7.5 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 — 7.7 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 — 1.4 mi
• Cochran Chapel Methodist Church — 1.4 mi
• Cochran Chapel Cemetery — 1.4 mi
• Garvin Memorial Cemetery — 1.7 mi