The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will celebrate its 125th birthday in 2011. The school opened in 1886 under the name Chattanooga University, but preparations for the founding of the school began nearly 20 years before. Of the four names the university has had over the years, it was Chattanooga University the shortest period: three years.
The university was started by the Northern Methodist Church which, after the Civil War, wanted a large central university in Eastern Tennessee. The Northern Methodist Church was formed due to a split in the church in 1844 over the issue of slavery. As a result of this disagreement, northern and southern divisions of the church were formed. At the end of the Civil War the Northern Methodist Church, aligned obviously with the victorious North, dipped into the South, primarily into areas controlled by Union forces. They seized the Methodist churches controlled by Southern Methodist congregations. This bushwhacking of churches continued into the 1870s. In the years immediately following the Civil War, many Northern businessmen from the Midwest, particularly Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, moved to Chattanooga. Many of these men had fought in the area during the war for the Union side.
Two previous attempts of the Northern Methodist Church to establish a large central university in the South had failed, due to the differences in organizer's intentions. There was already East Tennessee Wesleyan University in Athens, but the school had not grown since it was founded in 1866, nor had it shown the potential for the growth the church desired. Originally the Athens Female Academy, the school had been taken over by the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church. In 1866, the Tennessee legislature granted a charter for the school to be called East Tennessee Wesleyan College. The individuals behind this were William "Fighting Parson" Brownlow, Thomas H. Pearne and John F. Spence. Spence, a former Union Army chaplain during the Civil War, would become the chancellor of the university in 1889, and the president in 1891.
In August of 1872, the Pine Street Methodist Church in Chattanooga held a community meeting to discuss a college in the city. Attending this meeting were many of the leading ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. At this meeting it was decided to hold a General Education Convention among the conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the South, and one of their topics would be forming a central university in the South for the Methodist Episcopal Church. This university was also to be the central institution for the Holston, Central Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Blue Ridge and Virginia conferences of the church.
The convention was held the following month in Knoxville, and from the convention came the resolution to form such a university. In October, the Holston Conference met and voted in favor of this resolution. Knoxville was the first proposed site, but in 1873 the idea was abandoned due to financial problems. The school in Athens was under the authority of the Holston Conference of the church, but not the national church, so Athens was out. Nothing was decided for several years, as discussions centered on location and the role the Freedmen's Aid Association would have in the school.
In 1883, the Location Committee of the Methodist Church selected, over Athens and Knoxville, Chattanooga as the site of a central university. The Freedmen's Aid Association, formed by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1866 to assist former slaves, purchased from C.J. and G.S.J. Sheffield property in Chattanooga running along McCallie Avenue. The Freedmen's Aid Association had as its main focus the building of schools for former slaves, and the education of them. This 13-acre purchase cost $31,000. Groundbreaking for a large campus building was in 1884. Local architect J.W. Adams got the bid to build it. Originally budgeted at $40,000, costs would eventually run to $60,000. Adams was also one of the original trustees of the university. The other original trustees are a who's who of prominent Chattanoogans of the late 1800s, including Hiram S. Chamberlain, David E. Rees, J.J. Manker, Creed F. Bates, John T. Wilder, J.H. Van Deman and R.S. Rust.
Old Main was 120 by 100 feet and four stories high (not counting the basement). It was an imposing, gothic-looking building, in red brick with a large centered spire, flanked by two smaller ones on each side. It would be Chattanooga University in that it contained the entire university in one building. Included were science laboratories, 39 dormitory rooms, administrative offices, kitchen and dining hall, a library, a 400-seat chapel and housing for the faculty and staff. The Freedmen's Aid Association paid for most of the furnishings inside.
The first president of the university was not hired until just a few weeks before its opening. Dr. Richard Rust, the founder of the Freedmen's Aid Society, selected the president, and for that he chose a 31-year-old educator who, at the time, was at Little Rock University in Arkansas, which was also run by the Freedmen's Aid Society. His name was Dr. Edward Lewis (1855-1934), a native New Englander.
Chattanooga University opened on Sept. 15, 1886, with 118 students and a faculty of 10. In a little over a month, the enrollment had grown to 172. Five schools existed within the university: academic, collegiate, theological, musical and art. A university was born, but it would face a few rocky decades before it found its feet and began to grow.
Steve Cox, president of the Chattanooga Area Historical Association, is head of special collections and university archivist for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. This article appears in Volume 13, No. 2 of the Chattanooga Regional Historical Journal.