Godfrey College and High School was founded in 1880 by Robert Gold Isbell, president and an alumnus of Vanderbilt University, under the jurisdiction of the North Alabama Methodist Conference, one mile west on the Cheatham Road at the town of Motes. Elijah Blanton, Hugh W. Isbell, W.R. Atkins, and Andrew J. Ingle served as trustees. Its two-story college building and three-story dormitory burned in 1889, and the school was abandoned in 1893.