Morristown College — Half a Million Bricks, and Nothing Left Standing

Summary

Morristown College, on a 52-acre hilltop in Morristown, Tennessee, was founded on July 2, 1881 by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate the children and grandchildren of enslaved people in Appalachian East Tennessee. It survived fire, debt, and Jim Crow for more than a century; it did not survive the 1990s. Absorbed in 1989 as the satellite campus of Knoxville College — a fellow historically Black institution that was itself failing — the Morristown campus was closed in 1994, so quietly that published histories disagree about the final date. The buildings its own students had raised from half a million handmade bricks then stood empty for two decades — stripped, vandalized, twice burned — until the city bought the hill and cleared it in 2017 for a public park with a replica of the college's colonnade. Of the campus itself, nothing remains standing.

What was lost had few equals in its region. Before the civil rights movement, Morristown College was one of only two institutions of higher learning open to Black students in all of East Tennessee — the other was Knoxville College, its eventual rescuer and undertaker. Its first president, Judson S. Hill, a 27-year-old Methodist pastor from Trenton, New Jersey, arrived in October 1881 and stayed fifty years. Because the school and its students were poor, the students built the college themselves, firing bricks in campus kilns and milling lumber — some 500,000 bricks and 240,000 feet of timber by 1921. Enrollment peaked at 435 in the 1940s under Miller W. Boyd, the college's first alumnus president; by one count more than 15,000 students passed through, among them nearly half the Black Methodist ministers of the East Tennessee conference.

The mechanism of death was the cruel paradox that stalked many small HBCUs after desegregation: the justice the college existed to advance dissolved the captive enrollment that segregation had imposed. Once Tennessee's public campuses opened, an under-endowed private junior college could not compete with subsidized tuition. Enrollment fell to about 200 by 1963 and 112 by 1981–82; a reported 64 percent loan-default rate in 1979 endangered the federal aid it ran on; and in December 1986 the Southern Association revoked accreditation over its finances. Absorption by Knoxville College in 1989 bought five more years, but the parent was sinking too — $4 million in debt, 315 students, its own accreditation revoked in 1996 — and the satellite was the first economy. One history records the final 65 students being wound down in December 1995.

The closure took more than a school. For Black Morristown, the college on the hill had been employer, church partner, stage, and proof — three generations of evidence that the children of the enslaved could build, brick by literal brick, an institution of their own. Its slow public ruin, capped by the fires of 2008 and 2010, was a second loss. The colonnade replica in today's Fulton-Hill Park marks where the originals stood; the originals are gone.

Timeline

Bricks From Their Own Kilns

Morristown College began as Reconstruction's promise made local. Almyra H. Stearns, a missionary from New Jersey, had been teaching the Black children of Morristown since 1869, and in 1881 the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the great engine of Black education across the postwar South, chartered a school on her ground. The man the church sent, Judson S. Hill, was twenty-seven, white, and improbably durable: he would lead the college for half a century, navigate a Jim Crow hill town — chroniclers credit him with keeping an unusual interracial harmony — and beg with such effect that Andrew Carnegie, the McCormicks, and the Kelloggs all paid for pieces of the hilltop. The first property cost $525; 190 students enrolled in the first year.

What distinguished Morristown from a hundred other mission schools was the bargain at its core: students who could not pay tuition paid in labor, and the labor built the college. Young men learned brickmaking, carpentry, and agriculture; young women, the domestic sciences; the campus itself was their coursework — by 1921 students had fired roughly 500,000 bricks in the college's kilns and milled 240,000 feet of timber for its halls, while the trade shops' brooms sold across the country to feed the budget. When Crary Hall burned in 1922, and its successor burned in 1926, the college rebuilt — there were always more bricks where the first half million had come from. By 1901 it was Morristown Normal and Industrial College, 300 students strong; from 1914 it drew students from Africa as well as Appalachia; by Hill's death in 1931 its lands ran to 375 acres.

Its golden age came at mid-century, under its own. After J. W. Haywood became the college's first Black president, Miller W. Boyd — the first alumnus to lead it — took office in 1944 and brought enrollment to its historic peak of 435. The numbers understate the reach. In a region where the public universities were closed to Black students, Morristown and Knoxville College were the only two doors to higher education in all of East Tennessee, and Morristown's particular franchise was the pulpit and the schoolroom. Under segregation's ceiling, the college was less an option than an inheritance — the place a family's first graduate came from.

What Justice Took Back

The civil rights movement opened the doors Morristown College existed to compensate for, and the college rejoiced in the victory that would slowly unmake it. Once Black students could enroll at Tennessee's public universities and community colleges — larger, four-year, and underwritten by the state — a small private junior college had little left to sell but loyalty, and loyalty does not pay heat bills. Enrollment, 435 at the crest, was just over 200 by 1963. The college had modernized — high-school instruction ended in 1959; in 1961 it became the first HBCU accredited by the Southern Association as a junior college — but a two-year degree at private tuition could not compete with a subsidized one, and the slide resumed.

The 1970s and 1980s were a long rearguard action. The students Morristown still drew were those with the fewest resources, which chained the college's fortunes to federal financial aid; by 1979 the student-loan default rate was reported at 64 percent, a number that invites Washington to question eligibility itself. Enrollment touched bottom at 112 in 1981–82; a recruitment push nearly doubled it, to about 200, changing the trend but not the trajectory. In December 1986 the Southern Association revoked the college's accreditation, citing its financial deficiencies — and for a tuition-and-aid college, accreditation is the oxygen line. After 1986 the question was not whether Morristown College could survive alone. It could not. The question was who would take it in.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

For the students, the end was quiet and unrecorded in proportion to what it took: a few dozen young people, most of them underclassmen from families of modest means, were left to Knoxville College's failing main campus or to start again elsewhere; no formal teach-out survives in the public record. The faculty and staff of the satellite — by then a small payroll — went with it. The deeper loss ran through Black Morristown: the hill had held the jobs, the choirs, the diplomas — the physical proof of what three generations built from $525 and their own kilns. Alumni spent the following two decades watching that proof decay in public — windows broken, bricks carted off, Carnegie's hall burning on the evening news — a second, slower closure that many described as their history being erased.

The city's purchase finally gave the hill a steward. After the clearance, Morristown built a 52-acre public park, opened on November 16, 2019, and now named Fulton-Hill Park; its centerpiece is a replica of the Great Colonnade that once linked the college's buildings, set among a great lawn, walking trails, and an educational area. A state historical marker tells the story to park visitors. It is a dignified remembrance, and it is also an inventory of what remembrance is left: of the college that fired half a million bricks, taught 15,000 students, and seeded half the Black Methodist pulpits of East Tennessee, there remains a replica, a marker, a park — and the alumni who insist, correctly, that the hill is still sacred ground.

Lessons

References

• Morristown College Tennessee Encyclopedia
• Morristown College Wikipedia
• Morristown College: School of Freedom Sometimes Interesting
• This Place Matters – Morristown College The Knoxville Focus
• Knoxville College Abandoned Online