Morristown College, a historic African American higher education institution founded on this site in 1881 by the National Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, became one of East Tennessee’s distinctive educational institutions for African Americans before the Civil Rights movement. Supported by national donors including Andrew Carnegie, the McCormick family of Chicago, and the Kellogg family of Battle Creek, with funding efforts led by Dr. Judson S. Hill, its first president, it educated generations of African American leaders over more than 100 years, including college presidents, educators, businessmen, scientist, attorneys, artists, actors, Civil Rights activists, and ministers. The site had earlier been a slave market, where Andrew Fulton and his mother were sold for $1,400; after the Civil War, Fulton was educated at the school and later returned as one of its first professors. Part of the 1864 Battle of Morristown, the site also became a Federal occupation camp during the final months of the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction. The institution developed a reputation for student skills in masonry and manufacturing, with bricks made on site used in campus buildings and hundreds of other structures in Morristown and at nearby Carson Newman University, while student-made brooms became well known in America and Europe, and the school at one time operated a separate 300-acre dairy farm. During segregation it also served as an African American high school for Morristown and the surrounding area. Though its name changed from Morristown Seminary to Morristown Normal and Industrial College to Morristown College, it remained an important educational and cultural institution until, after a brief affiliation with Knoxville College, it closed in 1994.