Wallace Hall Academy is a secondary school in Thornhill, Dumfries and Galloway, in the south-west of Scotland, currently with a roll of over 600 pupils.HistoryThe original Wallace Hall was founded by John Wallace, a merchant in Glasgow and a native of Closeburn, who left £1.600 for the purpose of erecting the Academy in 1723. The John Wallace Trust continues to support young people in the Thornhill area by offering bursaries to help with the cost of higher education.Until the early nineteen seventies there were two secondary schools in the local area: the six-year Wallace Hall Academy at Closeburn and the four-year Morton Academy at Thornhill. In 1972 the two schools amalgamated and the new school at Thornhill became known as Wallace Hall Academy. Prior to this amalgamation an extensive building programme was started in 1970 and completed in 1978 in order to accommodate the pupils of both schools. The school continued to flourish on this site until, as part of Dumfries and Galloway Council's £100 million project to build nine new schools within the region, a new Wallace Hall Academy was built over the road beside the original school playing fields. The construction of the building started on 16 January 2008 and the new school opened in January 2010.