Education

Before the Civil War, voluntary associations of women existed in Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville, as well as in some rural areas. Most groups organized through local religious institutions to provide charitable services to the needy. With the establishment of these…

Martin Methodist College, located in Pulaski, Tennessee, evolved from the 1870 bequest of Thomas Martin, a prominent business leader known in and beyond Giles County. In his will, he fulfilled a promise made to his daughter, Victoria, to establish a…

Formerly the Tennessee and Alabama Female Institute, Mary Sharp College was chartered in Winchester in 1850. Opening in 1851, the school was named for an early benefactor. Under the direction of Dr. Z. C. Graves and the Baptist Church, Mary…

Maryville College, a distinguished higher education institution in Blount County, was among the first colleges in the country to open its doors to African American and Native American, as well as white, males and admitted women students as early as…

Chattanooga's McCallie School opened September 21, 1905, with eight teachers and 48 students on a family farm located on the western slope of Missionary Ridge donated by Presbyterian minister T. H. McCallie to his sons, James Park and Spencer J.…

Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire is best remembered for his indispensable role in the founding of Vanderbilt University. As a key player in wresting a charter for a central university from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, McTyeire acquired the money…

Meharry Medical College in Nashville originated in 1876 as the medical division of Central Tennessee College, an institution established by the Freedman's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The founding motivation was to train aspiring caregivers to serve not…

The Memphis College of Art is the only independent college in the South dually accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. It opened on October 5, 1936,…

The Memphis University School dates to September 1893, when E. S. Werts and J. W. S. Rhea founded the school with seven students and high hopes. The school opened in a city recovering from successive bouts of yellow fever and…

Located in Murfreesboro, Middle Tennessee State University was created by the General Education Bill of 1909 and dedicated on September 11, 1911, as Middle Tennessee State Normal School. Many local residents joined President Robert L. Jones, the faculty, staff, and…

Milligan College is located in Carter County in East Tennessee. Its origins go back to a Buffalo Male and Female Institute (1866) chartered by a small Christian (Disciples of Christ) congregation. In 1882 Josephus Hopwood upgraded it to a college…

In 1882 a group of Tennessee Sunday school workers organized an assembly patterned after that in Chautauqua, New York, which had been founded in 1873 to train Sunday School teachers during the summer. That fall, a site selection committee accepted…

Of the more than one dozen boys' schools established in Middle Tennessee at the turn of the nineteenth century, only Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA) remains in operation one hundred years later. Founded in 1867 as the preparatory department of the…

Harcourt Morgan, thirteenth president of the University of Tennessee (1919-34) and second chairman of the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority (1938-41), was born in Kerrwood, Adelaide Township, Middlesex County, Ontario, Canada, the child of a farming family.…

In 1881, the Methodist Episcopal Church founded Morristown College, a historically African American two-year institution of higher education, located in Morristown, the seat of Hamblen County, Tennessee. Prior to the civil rights movement, the college held the distinction of being…

On October 17, 1946, the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies (ORINS) received a charter of incorporation from the state of Tennessee, and with fourteen southern universities as its charter members, the consortium of ORINS began to work toward the…

Frank L. Owsley was a noted Vanderbilt University historian and apologist for the Old South. "The purpose of my life," he wrote to a colleague in 1932, "is to undermine . . . the entire Northern myth from 1820 to…

Shocked by reports and letters about the South's Civil War devastation, George Peabody (1795-1869) founded the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-69) to aid public education in eleven former Confederate states and West Virginia. Born in Massachusetts but a…

The Pi Beta Phi Settlement School in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, is one of the best extant examples of the early twentieth-century settlement school movement. The school’s origins date to 1910, when Pi Beta Phi, the first women’s fraternity, which was founded…

Pittman Center was founded by Dr. John S. Burnett, a Methodist minister and educator who had long dreamed of establishing an educational and medical facility in one of the most isolated sections of East Tennessee. In 1921 funding for this…