Blue Mountain Female College

Blue Mountain Female College

Blue Mountain Female College

Location: 201 West Main Street, Blue Mountain, Mississippi, USA

Opened: Founded 1873

Closed: Now coed; in 1956, began offering training for men in Baptist Church-related vocations, with all programs opening to men in 2005

From the Blue Mountain College website (with a little editing):

Blue Mountain College was founded in 1873 by Civil War Brigadier General Mark Perrin Lowrey.

As a village preacher before the war, General Lowrey was a man of vision who saw the importance of providing a thorough education for women.  The General felt that the South's recovery would be enhanced by the educating its young women.  He and his two oldest daughters, Modena and Margaret, comprised the first faculty at what was then Blue Mountain Female Institute.   Fifty students were enrolled for the first session.

Miss Modena Lowrey Berry, affectionately known as "Mother Berry" in later years, served as "Lady Principal" and then as vice president from 1873 to 1934, a tenure perhaps unequaled by a woman as a major college official.  She was the second woman in Mississippi's history to be named to the Mississippi Hall of Fame. 

Between 1873 and 1960 three generations of the Lowrey family including the General's sons, Dr. W. T. Lowrey and Dr. B. G. Lowrey, and his grandson, Dr. Lawrence T. Lowrey, presided over the college.  In 1960 Dr. Wilfred C. Tyler, long-time professor of Bible at the school, accepted the presidency and served until his death in 1965.  Dr. E. Harold Fisher served the college as president from July 1, 1965, until his retirement June 30, 2001.  Dr. Bettye Rogers Coward assumed responsibilities as the seventh president of Blue Mountain College on July 1, 2001.

Blue Mountain College was independently owned and administered until 1920, when control was turned over to the Mississippi Baptist Convention. From 1873 to 2005, the school operated as a traditional liberal arts college for women.  In 1956 at the request of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, the College opened its doors to men preparing for church-related vocations.  

On October 4, 2005, the Board of Trustees of Blue Mountain College unanimously voted to make all programs offered by the College available to male students, thus making BMC fully co-educational.

Modena Lowrey Berry

At this blog, we hear more about the remarkable Modena Berry, a steel magnolia if ever there was one. (It's interesting that in all the material I've looked at on this college, I haven't seen one word about the wife of General Lowrey, the mother of all these children):

Modena Lowrey Berry (1850-1942), known as "Mother Berry," if considered to be the co-founder of the college and was the vice president at Blue Mountain for an incredible span of 61 years. At age 90, while still at her post, she fell and broke her leg after slipping on the steps of the college’s Administration building. Rushed to the Baptist hospital in Memphis, she spent several weeks in recovery. Unfortunately, she would never be able to walk again. Remarkably, she returned to her beloved college and resumed her duties in a wheelchair. "Mother Berry" died the next year, and was laid to rest in the Blue Mountain Cemetery. Her tenure as a college administrator is likely never to be equaled.

Now that's a commitment to women's education! Though I presume, given that this was Mississippi, that the education was limited to white women until comparatively recently.

And notice that while Modena served as vice president for 61 years, the presidency was reserved for her father, her brothers, and later her nephew. Even though this was a college that was supposed to be for women....

Hough Home

228 North Congress Street today

Hough Home

Address: 228 North Congress Street, Jackson, Mississippi, USA

Opened: Between 1917 and 1920; became women only with death of Dr. Joseph W. Hough on December 11, 1920.

Closed: Sold on March 1, 1985 to the Magnolia Federal Bank

The Hough Home (sometimes referred to as the Joseph W. Hough Home - Business Woman's Home or the Business Women's Home) was said to be the last of the old-fashioned, ladies-only boarding houses in the State of Mississippi. According to the 1920 Census, Dr. Hough, a 92-year-old widower, was still living at this address--with twenty-five women. But by the time he passed away at the end of the year, it was strictly for the ladies until 1985.

From the Waycross Journal-Herald, May 4, 1985:

The closing of the historical Hough Home in Mississippi's capital ends the days of women-only boarding houses that offered rooms, meals and sets of rules for parlour courting.

"The Hough House was the last of an era because there's nothing else like it around. I don't know of another boarding house for women. The younger girls now are more independent and all want to share together--they're more adventuresome," said Elaine Porter, 38, who has lived at the Hough House for four years.

The downtown Jackson structure was built between 1912 to 1915 and purchased by Dr. Joseph W. Hough in 1917. Hough donated the two-story colonial revival wood-frame house to a charitable organization.

"It was Dr. Hough's specific request that the house be used for the benefit of the women in the business community," according to Jackson Landmarks, a historical guide compiled by the Junior League of Jackson.

The eight-member Hough Home of Board of Directors sold the house to Magnolia Federal Bank on March 1.

"It was getting too expensive to run. It wasn't serving its purpose. The girls didn't work downtown, they worked all over the city and there wasn't adequate parking," said Hough Home Board President Sallie Crim.

The money from the sale will go into a scholarship fund for students at local colleges.

Single women boarding in the Hough Home were usually Mississippians fresh out of high school or college with jobs in state government, banks and insurance agencies.

Hostess Janie Gamble said they discovered the boarding house through word of mouth.

"It was never advertised. That way you never have as many undesirables applying. I tried and did keep it decent, where a mother would be glad for her daughter to stay there," Ms. Gamble said.

Curfews went out of style with bell-bottom jeans in the 70s, she said, but most tenants still returned home early on weeknights and "not too late" on Friday and Saturday nights.

It was downstairs-only for male visitors, who were restricted to the den and living room. The women could have men up to their bedrooms for moving purposes only, and that was strictly with the permission of the hostess.

The Hough Home was the last of the Jackson women's boarding homes that ran according to the old school of courting, where couples stayed at elbows-length until marriage, Ms. Gamble said.

"I don't know where the girls are supposed to go to meet a young man. They used to go to church...I always told them you don't meet nice young men in bars," she said.

For Belinda Gurley, who lived in the Hough Home for seven years, the house was sometimes an answer to sensitive dating situations. "In this day and time, I'm pretty liberal. But if you went out with somebody and when they took you home, there wasn't a problem," she said.

"I suppose if the Hough Home hadn't closed, I would have stayed there until I was married or an old maid," laughed Miss Gurley, who moved in with a former "Houghee" at a downtown Jackson apartment complex.

Ms. Gamble, 71, known as "Granny" to former Hough residents, said many of her tenants came to Hough Home from small Mississippi towns in hopes of meeting "responsible young bachelors. But it doesn't always work out like that."

"I'd tell them, 'Well honey, you've got to learn to stand on your own two feet and you know you really do,'" she said. She worked as a beautician before accepting the job as Hough Home hostess in May 1972.

For $135 a month, tenants received three meals each weekday and a semi-private furnished room. With room for 46 women, the Hough Home was sometimes close to empty and at other times had a waiting list.

"I miss all of the girls. They were sweet to me; they were just precious to me and almost always they respected me. Always I was Granny; that's what they all called me," Ms. Gamble said.

"I just wish that I had started taking notes. Some of them were really hilarious; some of them you could have spanked for it."

Mount Hermon Female Seminary





Sara Dickey Hall

Mount Hermon Female Seminary

Location: Clinton, Mississippi, USA

Founded: 1875


Closed: 1924, by the American Missionary Association, which had its own college in Tougaloo, Mississippi

Mount Hermon Female Seminary was a historically black institution of higher education for women. Founded in 1875 by Sarah Ann Dickey, the school was patterned after Dickey's alma mater, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

Sarah Ann Dickey was quite a brave and fascinating woman. Her life's story demonstrates how violent the struggle for educational rights and opportunities for women and African-Americans really was, and how leaders in the struggle, such as Charles Caldwell, actually lost their lives. Notice also how freedmen, despite their povery, invested what little they had in creating educational opportunties for their daughters.

The following account is derived from the American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc.:

Dickey, Sarah Ann (25 Apr. 1838-23 Jan. 1904), teacher of freedwomen, was born near Dayton, Ohio, the daughter of Isaac Dickey and his wife, whose maiden name was Tryon. Following her mother's death in 1846, Sarah Dickey was placed with farming relatives who neglected their promise to educate her. At age sixteen, having averaged ten to fifteen days of schooling per year, she remained illiterate. It was with understandable shock and some amusement that her family received her announcement that she wanted to become a teacher. Undeterred, Dickey struck a bargain with a neighboring family to work in exchange for board and the long-coveted opportunity to attend school. After three years, to her family's astonishment, she earned a teaching certificate, and over the next seven years she taught in country schools near Dayton.

Driven inward by her early deprivations, Dickey relied on promptings from visions, dreams, and a voice she viewed as God's. In 1858 she joined the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, later the Evangelical United Brethren. She applied for missionary work in Africa but was denied. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation prompted the American Missionary Association (AMA) to establish a freedmen's school in Vicksburg, Mississippi. They selected Dickey and two other teachers to open it. Conditions in the wartorn city were shocking; one of Dickey's fellow teachers died of typhoid fever. Following Appomattox, the AMA was forced to abandon the school, calling her north again.

Feeling the need for more education, Dickey set her sights on Mount Holyoke Seminary. Borrowing money from her church, she set out for Massachusetts, arriving in South Hadley with thirty-four cents in her pocket and conspicuously missing her trunk, which she had been forced to leave as collateral for the last leg of her trip. Dickey managed to secure a place and, through Mary Lyon's famous domestic work system, earned her way through the four-year course, graduating in 1869. Deeply affected by her experience, and consulting as always her guiding voice, Dickey felt charged with a divine mission: to establish a Mount Holyoke for freedwomen. Dickey began teaching in a freedman's school in Raymond, Mississippi, in January 1870. A year later she moved on to a newly opened school in nearby Clinton, which a local politician declared an unmitigated outrage against Clinton's white citizens. Harassed daily by whites and threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, Dickey was offered lodging by Senator Charles Caldwell, one of the most powerful black leaders in the state. Warning shots fired over her head during class and open threats in the street prompted her response that she had come south to do God's work and would be removed only by death.

While teaching at the free school, Dickey laid the foundation for her seminary, tirelessly soliciting funds and recruiting a biracial board of trustees headed by Caldwell. She secured a charter in 1873 and the following year procured a suitable building on 160 acres of land. Much of the money came from freedmen, despite their destitution. She was making final preparations when Clinton exploded in race riots on 4 September 1875, forcing a delay. For Dickey, the chaos only underscored the need for her school. On 4 October 1875 the Mount Hermon Female Seminary, a nonsectarian school for young black women, opened its doors. Two months later Caldwell was killed by a white mob.

Dickey modeled Mount Hermon as closely as possible after Mount Holyoke. She instituted a domestic work system, setting exacting standards for cleanliness, punctuality, and industriousness. In addition to the elementary course, Dickey offered a three-year, and later four-year, normal course, featuring yearly English and Bible courses, liberal science offerings, music, and education theory. The catalog promised that students completing the course would have no trouble obtaining teacher's certification, and this proved true. In fact, Mount Hermon students were so well prepared that many obtained certification without completing the course. Dickey's dream for a Mount Holyoke for freedwomen, however, rested on the advanced course, which included Latin, philosophy, further science, English, and religious studies. Only one student graduated the course, yet Dickey continued to offer it until her death, believing that nothing less would do her students justice. Economic and social turmoil and the strong demand for Mount Hermon teachers drew most students away before entering this level.

Though it fell short in that aspect, Mount Hermon exerted tremendous influence in the community. When Clinton closed its free school, Dickey admitted the local children as day students. The Mount Hermon commencement was a source of pride and a big social event, the students acquitting themselves so well that it inspired the grudging respect of many in the white community. Many displaced children found a home at Mount Hermon, and Dickey helped families as she could, offering financial advice and accompanying workers to the cotton markets to ensure fair compensation. In the mid-1890s she bought 120 acres of land and offered tracts on credit to freedmen to build homes. They promptly built the Holy Ghost Baptist Church on the first lot of "Dickeyville," as the neighborhood was called. This was one of the thirty-eight churches burned in Mississippi in 1964. Over the decades the white community began to perceive the value of her work. By 1889 Dickey could write that all of the prejudice against her had been erased.

In 1896 Dickey was ordained a minister of the United Brethren in Christ. However, despite years of tireless solicitation and creative financial endeavors, she was unable to secure permanent funding for her school. Following her death in Clinton at age sixty-five, the school was entrusted to the AMA, whose interests lay in its nearby Tougaloo University. The school fell into neglect and was closed in 1924. Only the brass bell and the gravesite, dedicated and maintained by the Mississippi State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, remain of Mount Hermon. A memorial building at Tougaloo and a laboratory at Mount Holyoke bear Sarah Dickey's name.

As amazing as Sarah Dickey was, I wish I could include something here about what life was like at the school, or how the students felt about the education they received there. But like so much of women's history--especially African-American women's history--those voices have apparently been lost.

Photo: Sara (sic?) Dickey Hall (formerly, Sara Dickey Memorial Hospital), Tougaloo College, Tourgaloo, Mississippi