Site of Six Mile Male and Female Academy

On this spot once stood the Six Mile Male and Female Academy, one of rural Alabama's enduring schools. Years before the Civil War, a local couple named Good donated two acres for a school, and a two-story wooden building went up. The academy was formally incorporated in eighteen fifty-nine and ran without break until eighteen ninety-seven.

Its best-known headmaster, Captain Richard Pratt, left to join the Confederate Army and later returned to teach here. By the eighteen eighties students studied Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, rhetoric, and music, and the school trained many young men for the ministry. Fire destroyed the original buildings in eighteen ninety-seven.

The school was rebuilt and renamed, became a public school in nineteen oh two, and finally closed in nineteen eighty-one.