Tennessee College for Women

When the Southern Baptist Convention closed the college in 1945, alumni and townspeople went to court to keep it in Murfreesboro and lost. It had opened in the fall of 1907 with 199 students, 131 of them boarders, and a May Day festival begun about 1910 drew crowds of townspeople to watch students dance around the flagpole. The Depression cut enrollment to 78. In January 1946 it merged into Cumberland University, and the remaining departments later went to Belmont College in Nashville.

What the plaque says

Tennessee College for Women On this site was Tennessee's only senior college for women for thirty-eight years, training students from throughout the United States to be educators, missionaries, and homemakers. The ideal of its Baptist founders was to offer the very best educational advantages under positive Christian influence.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stones River National Battlefield — 3.5 mi
  The Murfreesboro battlefield of December 1862, with a national cemetery built by Black soldiers, a Trail of Tears route and the story of the freedmen's settlement called Cemetery.
• Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration — 25 mi
  The Shelbyville show grounds where the Tennessee Walking Horse has been crowned world grand champion each late summer since 1939, and where the practice of soring is part of the story.
• Henry Horton State Park — 25 mi
  A Duck River park on Governor Henry Horton's former farm in Marshall County, with a mill ruin from 1845, kayak floats and the grave of a governor the House declined to impeach.
• Fort Negley — 30 mi
  The largest inland stone fort of the Civil War, built in 1862 on St. Cloud Hill by more than 2,700 conscripted Black laborers, hundreds of whom died.

More markers nearby

• Union University — steps away
• Joseph B. Palmer — 0.3 mi
• Rutherford Hospital / Middle Tennessee Medical Center — 0.3 mi
• Middle Tennessee State Teachers College Training School — 0.4 mi