Hockaday Homestead, Site of

After a noted career as an educator and founder of Giles Academy (4 mi. east), Virginia-born Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday (1835-1918) bought more than 280 acres in this area in 1870. He farmed the land and built and operated a cotton gin. He later sold much of the property but maintained an eighty-acre homestead on this site for his wife Maria and their seven children. Following Maria's death in 1881, he married Misouri Bird in 1892. Hockaday sold his property to Laurence Pickard in 1916 and moved to Ladonia (4.5 mi. west) where he spent the remaining two years of his life. Pickard moved the Hockaday house in 1921 and divided it into rent houses for the farm's employees. Although the house itself is gone, the existing barn was constructed from Hockaday's cotton gin. T. H. B. Hockaday's youngest child, Ela (1875-1956), followed her father's footsteps into education. In 1913, at the peak of a teaching career that began at age eighteen, she established the Hockaday School in Dallas. In the thirty-three years she was with the institution, the Hockaday School earned national recognition as an excellent college preparatory school for girls. Ela Hockaday was instrumental in the founding of the Hockaday Alumnae Association which continues to carry on the Hockaday tradition. (1981, 1998)

Hockaday Homestead, Site of is a historical marker in Pecan Gap, Fannin County, dedicated in 1998. It is one of 109 historical markers documented in Fannin County in the Texas Historical Commission Atlas, among 262 historic sites cataloged across the county.

The site sits at 33.4371, -95.8683 near Pecan Gap. The nearest cataloged historic site is Central National Road (historical marker), about 0.4 miles away. Others within a short drive include Bourland Cemetery, Site of Fort Lyday, and Bledsoe Cemetery.

This record corresponds to Texas Historical Commission Atlas #5147008897. Use the map below for its exact position and turn-by-turn directions.