Morristown College

The college grew from a Freedmen's Bureau grammar school started about 1869 by Almyra H. Stearns, a New Jersey missionary. When the Methodist Episcopal Church made it a seminary and normal school in 1881, its first president, Judson S. Hill, raised money from Andrew Carnegie, the McCormicks and the Kelloggs and turned the curriculum toward industrial training; its brooms sold across the country. Miller W. Boyd became the first alumnus to lead it in 1944. After 1989 Knoxville College ran it as a junior college until the mid-1990s. The campus is on the National Register.

What the plaque says

Morristown College Morristown College, a two-year co-educational liberal arts institution, was founded as Morristown Seminary by Reverend Judson S. Hill in 1881. The first building used to provide education for the Negro youth of East Tennessee stood near this site on the present campus. It had previously served as a slave mart, a hospital for Union and Confederate soldiers, a Baptist church, and an elementary school.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — 21 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Vardy Community Museum — 25 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.

More markers nearby

• Morris Cemetery — 1.0 mi
• Panther Springs — 5.0 mi
• Hayslope — 5.9 mi
• Longstreet's Billet — 6.1 mi