Martin College

Martin Female College opened in 1870 through Thomas Martin's will: a former mayor of Pulaski, he left a $30,000 endowment for a college for white girls and women of Giles County. It is sometimes said he did so to keep a promise to his dying daughter Victoria. The college admitted only white students until it integrated in 1966, and it became coeducational in 1938. It was Martin College from 1908 and Martin Methodist College from 1986. In 2021 the campus passed to the University of Tennessee system, which renamed it UT Southern.

What the plaque says

Martin College Thomas Martin founded Martin Female College in 1870, to fulfill the wish of his dying daughter for a girls' school in Giles County. Its first president was William K. Jones. Fire destroyed it in 1904. It became coeducational in 1937. The Methodist Church now operates it as an accredited junior college.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pulaski Public Square and the Giles County Courthouse — 0.5 mi
  The 1909 courthouse and nineteenth-century storefronts on Pulaski's square, in the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded and where the architect Moses McKissack III was born.
• James D. Vaughan Southern Gospel Music Museum — 17 mi
  A museum on the third floor of the Vaughan Municipal Building on the Lawrenceburg square, honoring the shape-note publisher who built a songbook, quartet and radio empire here from 1903.
• David Crockett State Park — 19 mi
  A Lawrenceburg park on Shoal Creek where Davy Crockett ran a gristmill, a powder mill and a distillery from 1817, and later broke with Andrew Jackson over Indian removal.
• Meriwether Lewis Site — 32 mi
  The place on the Natchez Trace Parkway where Meriwether Lewis died in October 1809, with his 1848 monument, a pioneer cemetery, a walk on the Old Trace and a free campground.

More markers nearby

• Walter Herschel Beech — 0.5 mi
• Donald Grady Davidson and John Crowe Ransom — 0.5 mi
• Gabriel McKissack — 0.9 mi
• Bridgeforth High School — 1.0 mi