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McCoy Hall at Rust College, a long red-brick building with a central clock tower and white cupola under a cloudy sky.Carol M. Highsmith / public domain via Library of Congress
🎭Cultural

Rust College

Part ofOxford & the North Hills

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.

⏱
Duration
Thirty minutes to an hour.
🎟
Admission
Free to walk the campus; ask the college about access to buildings.
📅
Best Season
Year round; the campus is liveliest during the school year.

The Story

Holly Springs was founded in 1836 on land the Chickasaw had held for centuries, and Rust College began there thirty years later. In 1866 the Reverend Moses Adams, a formerly enslaved minister, and Albert Collier McDonald, a white Methodist Episcopal clergyman, started a church school at Asbury Methodist Church for freed people. It was the first historically Black college founded in Mississippi.

It was chartered in 1870 as Shaw University, became Rust University in 1890 and took the name Rust College in 1914. Ida B. Wells attended in the 1870s, and her father, James Wells, served as a trustee. Perry Howard, a graduate of 1899, became an assistant U.S. attorney general under Warren G. Harding.

In the 1960s, under President Earnest A. Smith, the college supported voter registration, welcomed SNCC workers and let James Meredith spend weekends on campus while he was enrolled at Ole Miss. The college gained regional accreditation under William A. McMillan, who became president in 1967, and a new science building opened in 2008. It remains a small college supported by the United Methodist Church. The campus on Rust Avenue is a short walk from the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum.

Visitor Info

⏱
Time Needed
Thirty minutes to an hour.
🎟
Admission
Free to walk the campus; ask the college about access to buildings.
📅
Best Season
Year round; the campus is liveliest during the school year.
🛣️
Highway
Rust Avenue

On the Map

Nearby

The closest stops worth working into your route

historical0.3 mi away
Ida B. Wells-Barnett Museum
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.
cultural29 mi away
Oxford Square
The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
historical29 mi away
The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi
The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
historical29 mi away
Rowan Oak
William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
recreational32 mi away
Sardis Lake and Dam
A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.
historical45 mi away
Casey Jones Railroad Museum
The old Illinois Central depot in Water Valley, where Casey Jones worked in the 1890s, with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker for the songs written about his death in 1900.