Blue Mountain College

Mark Perrin Lowrey, a Baptist preacher and Confederate brigadier general, opened Blue Mountain Female Institute in 1873 with fifty students and four faculty, serving as president and as professor of history and ethics. Mississippi chartered it in 1877. After his death in 1885 his will asked that it stay in the family, and two sons and a grandson held the presidency for seventy-five years. The college joined the Mississippi Baptist Convention in 1919. Men began training for church vocations in the late 1950s, and coeducation began in January 2006. In 2022 it was renamed Blue Mountain Christian University.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site — 20 mi
  The crossroads where Nathan Bedford Forrest routed a larger Union force in June 1864, and where Black regiments, many raised at Corinth, held the bridge that let most of the army escape.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum — 25 mi
  The house in Holly Springs where Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in 1862, now a museum of African American history, art and culture.
• Rust College — 25 mi
  The first historically Black college founded in Mississippi, started in 1866 in a Holly Springs church by a formerly enslaved minister and a white Methodist clergyman.
• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 30 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.

More markers nearby

• Tippah County — 6.0 mi
• William Clark Falkner — 6.0 mi
• Myrtle — 9.4 mi
• Mosley and Johnson — 12 mi