Education

Arrowmont, a visual arts complex in Gatlinburg in Sevier County, grew out of the manual arts curriculum of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School. The Pi Phi teachers taught handicraft skills to the community while seeking to revive traditional crafts…

The Athenaeum rectory is a historic Gothic Revival building in Columbia that was once part of a women's college and finishing school which operated between 1852 and 1903. The Reverend Franklin Gillete Smith, a Vermont native who came to Columbia…

Located in Clarksville, Austin Peay State University was founded on April 26, 1927, and named for Governor Austin Peay, a Clarksville resident. The campus had been the location of educational institutions dating back to 1806. The first on the site…

Named for its location on the Franklin Civil War battlefield, Battle Ground Academy (BGA) opened for classes on September 3, 1889. A group of local stockholders organized and chartered the school. The board of directors selected S. V. Wall and…

Fannie Battle, Confederate spy and social reformer, was born in the Cane Ridge community of Davidson County on her family's plantation. Educated at the Nashville Female Academy, Battle was living at home when the Civil War began. Her father and…

In 1893 a group of men prominent in the professional, industrial, and civic life of Chattanooga invited noted educator John Roy Baylor to the city and cleared the way for the founding of the University School. Among the founders were…

Originally named Belle Monte, Italian for "beautiful mountain," this lavish 180-acre Nashville estate was the summer home of Joseph and Adelicia Acklen.

The history of Belmont University begins with Adelicia Acklen, mistress of Belmont Mansion, and two schools for women which operated on the mansion's grounds: the first Belmont College (1890-1913) and Ward-Belmont (1913-51). After a century of education on the campus…

Located in McKenzie, Carroll County, Bethel College is one of two institutions of higher learning for the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. In 1842 the college began in nearby McLemoresville as the Bethel Seminary, established by the West Tennessee Synod, Cumberland Presbyterian…

The Boy Scout program came to both the United States and Tennessee in 1910, only three years after General Robert Baden-Powell founded the program in Great Britain. In 1909 William Perry "Buck" Toms read an article on the scouting movement…

Bradley Academy is a historic African American school in Murfreesboro that now serves as a community heritage center. The name Bradley Academy was given to the first school in Murfreesboro and to subsequent school buildings located on property donated by…

Brainerd Mission was a multi-acre mission school situated on Chickamauga Creek near present-day Chattanooga. Named for eighteenth-century missionary David Brainerd, it was the largest institution of its type among the Eastern Cherokees. The Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign…

John Calvin Brown, Confederate general and governor, was born in Giles County on January 6, 1827, to Duncan and Margaret (Smith) Brown. He was the younger brother of former governor Neill S. Brown. After graduating from Jackson College in Columbia,…

While in Dayton for the Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan expressed to friends his dream that a prep school and junior college to be founded in the town. Bryan had long believed that a Christian school, emphasizing the Bible and…

James M. Buchanan received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economics for "his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision making." In its announcement of the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences…

The now defunct Burritt College was founded in 1848 at Spencer, Van Buren County, as a preparatory school and junior college under the auspices of the Churches of Christ. The college was an early coeducational institution with a classical curriculum…

John W. Butler, state representative from Macon, Trousdale, and Sumner Counties (1923-27), wrote the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act, better known as the Tennessee Monkey Law. The son of a long-settled farming family in Macon County, as a young man Butler taught…

Located in the unincorporated community of Cairo, the Cairo Rosenwald School is one of three extant Rosenwald schools remaining in Sumner County and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1922-23, the school served African American…

Francis Joseph Campbell, a leading educator for the blind in the United States and Great Britain, was born in Franklin County on October 9, 1832. A childhood accident left Campbell blind at the age of four. He attended regular schools…

African American educator Charles W. Cansler was born in Maryville, one of several children of Hugh Lawson and Laura Ann Scott Cansler. Cansler's mother had become Knoxville's first African American teacher in 1864, when she obtained permission from General Ambrose…