GAINESVILLE COLLEGE. Gainesville College, located in the former Zack Addington home on South Denton Street in Gainesville, began as a private coeducational institution on September 7, 1891, under the presidency of T. S. Belsher. The faculty consisted of at least four instructors, who taught courses including languages, bookkeeping, music, and art to the forty students who enrolled for the first term. Tuition was fifteen dollars a semester for each course in the primary departments, twenty dollars a semester for each intermediate course, and twenty-five dollars a half-term for each collegiate course. Gainesville College remained open until the end of the 1893-94 term, when Belsher left to head a college in Pilot Point, Texas. After the close of the college, the building was torn down, and in 1896 the materials salvaged were used to build the Gainesville Opera House, located at the corner of Rusk and Main streets.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. Morton Smith, The First 100 Years in Cooke County (San Antonio: Naylor, 1955).
