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Mary Sharp College Building Soon Will Pass into History

By Gilbert K. Hinshaw

 

            With the removal of the Winchester elementary school from the venerable building that once housed the Mary Sharp College to a modernistic school plant on North Jefferson, last October, learning and instruction turned their backs forever upon the edifice where once classic Greek and Latin were lectured.  In an age whose people perpetually look forward, let us for a moment be retrospective of the culture and the people who built and caused the Mary Sharp to flourish.

 

            The opening in 1854 of the Mary Sharp College in the building located on the Cowan highway as an institution of female education comparable to that of men’s colleges, was the fulfillment of a dream which was born in the early 1840's in the imagination of the Rev. J. R. Graves of Vermont, educator and minister; and it was in the late 1840's that he was visiting in Winchester, then a town of 1500, and foresaw the possible site for his college.

 

            He gained the assistance of the town’s influential citizens, including A. S. Colyar and Judge Peter Turney and together they obtained from Jackson County, Alabama, and Franklin County a charter granting the establishment of a college to be called the Tennessee-Alabama Female Institute.

 

            The college opened in January 1850 in a private dwelling, the Turman house, and Dr. Z. C. Graves, brother of the Rev. Graves, was called from Kingsville, Ohio to be its first president.  The student body at first numbered less than twenty and the faculty five.  By the end of the year there were 100 students, and the school was moved to the basement rooms of the Baptist Church where it was to remain for two years.

 

            Meanwhile, Mrs. Mary Sharp, the widow of the late James Sharp, wealthy planter and slave owner of Franklin County, donated a large part of the school’s endowment and construction on a permanent building was begun.  Mary Sharp was an extraordinary person and little less than a humanitarian.  She had in 1840 [sic, should be 1847] at her husband’s death, freed her slaves and paid their passage to Liberia, where one of them later became president of that Negro republic.  She had no children, but reared several nieces and nephews, and adopted one niece, Susan F. Sharp who graduated with the first A. M. Degree in 1885 [sic, should 1858].

 

            The school opened in the new building in 1854 and the drama of a golden era in women’s education began to unfold.  Professor Johann Svensen, of the Conservatory of Music in Stockholm, came to head the music department along with other instructors of equal academic respectability.  The curriculum of study was classic and stately: Greek, Latin, calculus, astronomy, history, composition, logic, rhetoric, metaphysics, philosophy, geography, moral science, and the study of Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Plato, and Homer.

 

            On the completion of the four-year course the first diplomas were given in 1855 to three ladies: Nannie Meredity [sic, should be Meredith], Mary A. Farmer and Matilda Winford.  The diploma, in Latin, which was issued is the earliest found to date issued by a woman’s college which in form, content, and the work for which it stood, can compare at all favorable with the B. A. degree of all male colleges.

 

            Thus, the school grew and it’s fame spread throughout the South, and in 1861 it had a student body of 400 students from eleven Southern states, but it was in this year that Mary Sharp’s glory was to end for the war for Southern independence had begun.  Though Tennessee did not join the Confederacy until June 24, Franklin County was actively supporting the Southern states by March.  Col. Peter Turney, who had been president of the board of trustees, raised the first regiment of Confederates in the state during March and April and left Winchester on May 2, with 2,500 men to join the Confederate armies in Virginia.

 

            A member of the graduating class of 1861, Miss Fannie Landress [sic, should be Landess], tells how Mary Sharp bid farewell to the regiment: “One bright morning in May the whole school assembled in front of the college to hear Col. Turney’s departing speech before he went to the front.  And when he had finished, there were waving handkerchiefs and cheering shouts and the daughters of the South saw the little army of Franklin County march away.  Mrs. Mary Sharp was at that farewell too, and nearly blind now, she sat silently trimmed in lace and veiled in black.”

 

            The college closed that year and the tide of war swept over Tennessee, as the army of Gen. Rosecrans suddenly marched on Winchester and occupied the town, using the college building as a hospital.  Needless to say, all was lost, and the Mary Sharp was ruined.

 

            In the fall of 1865 the school reopened, and from the bare walls, Dr. Graves with his own money refurnished the building.  Students returned, but very slowly, during the harsh days of the reconstruction.  No longer did the daughters of Southern aristocracy swing into the little town in a glittering coach driven by Negro coachmen and ornamented by Negro footmen.  No longer did the “little Missus” bring along her black “mammy” or a slave girl to act as her maid while she attended this first institution for the higher education of Southern womanhood.  No longer was Winchester crowded during the June commencement week with the families of the girls–dignified colonels, with their ladies, dashing young brothers, children with their negro slave nurses.

 

            Mary Sharp was a college of the old South.  Its aim was purely cultural.  It educated women primarily for the leisurely, intellectual and dignified life of the Southern Aristocracy.  Had not the war intervened to sweep away the old social order, Mary Sharp undoubtedly would have become the foremost institution of its kind in the nation.

 

            There was one graduate in 1866, Miss Tuisana Allen, Gainsville, Tennessee [the 1893 college catalogue lists her as Miss Quixana Allen (Sneed) Cainsville, Tenn.].  There were none in 1867, but in 1868 there were six: Nina L. Dufield (Drake), Winchester; Mary E. Hollingsworth, Gryan [sic, ?]City, Texas; Maggie Marks (Fitzpatrick), St. Augustine, Florida; Annie E. Russey (Beemer), Dallas, Texas; Hattie Schoffner (Landess), Mulberry, Tennessee; Lizzie Turman (Grisard), Winchester.  The class of 1869 conferred degrees upon twelve graduates.

 

            In 1891 Dr. Graves resigned the presidency of the college whose student body had year by year declined, to accept a position as president of Soule College in Murfreesboro.  In 1893, however, he returned to Mary Sharp.  Not even the beloved leader could avail in the face of the national panic of 1893, however, and the institution waned rapidly, permanently closing its doors in 1896.

 

[Article published in a 1950 Tennessee Newspaper–date and name of paper not included with article.  Punctuation, spelling, and capitalization is as used in article.]

 

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Franklin County Historical Review, Volume XI, January 1980, No. 1, page 45

 

“...After Mary Sharp College closed its doors in 1896, the building became a public school.  In about 1903 the trustees of the college deeded to the 1^st public school district of Franklin County the Mary Sharp property ‘to be forever used by them for public school purposes.’  An auction sale advertised for April 11, 1951, was prevented when this stipulation was called to the attention of the county court....  In 1953 the building was razed.  The Mary Sharp School for primary grades, completed in the spring of 1954, now stands on the old Mary Sharp College property.” 

[Since 1994, this building has been used for the offices of the Franklin County Board of Education.]