Braden Mulford, founder of the Highland Adventist Community, came to Tennessee in 1004 as a charter student of the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute, later commonly known as Madison College, near Nashville. E.A. Sutherland and P.T. Magan, encouraged by Ellen White, founded that enterprise to train Adventist families to start similar institutions in the underprivileged South. After attending Madison for two years, Mulford acquired this farm in December, 1907. He married Pearl West, and his sister Lula Mulford West and her husband Forrest West joined him in the work, with Mulford running the school and West the farm. A few years later they added a sanitarium to the campus, the first medical institution of its kind in Sumner County, and operated a farm-school-sanitarium for 30 years before resigning in 1937. The Kentucky-Tennessee Conference took over the enterprise in 1945 and changed the name to Highland Academy. In a May 4, 1916, account, W.C. White wrote that the workers at Fountain Head had long felt the need for a small rural sanitarium, that they had moved their schoolhouse since December, 1914, and had built a two-story, 12-room cottage with basement bathrooms to care for the sick, boarding patients, and neighbors. The first sanitarium building was destroyed by fire on February 2, 1928, a rebuilt facility was lost in another fire in 1935, and a third structure served as a community hospital from the 1940s until 1983 before a new building was erected closer to town.