The Highland community grew out of the nineteenth-century rise of the Seventh-Day Adventist movement. Ellen White, one of Adventism’s founders, urged church members to begin work in the South, with a mission of spreading Christianity by teaching agricultural methods and healthful living and by providing work-study opportunities for youth. A school began 0.3 mile east of here in 1907, followed by a church in 1909 and a sanitarium in 1913. Reverse Braden and Pearl Mulford, together with Forrest and Lulu West, founded the Fountain Head Industrial School and Sanitarium as extensions of an Adventist school begun at Madison, Tennessee, in 1904. Fires destroyed the sanitarium in 1928 and again in 1935, and Russell Crutcher supervised the second rebuilding. By 1940 the new facility had opened with Dr. Reuben Johnson as medical director, and in 1945 the Kentucky Tennessee Conference of SDA took over management and renamed the institutions Highland Academy and Highland Hospital.