Martin Methodist College

Martin Methodist College, located in Pulaski, Tennessee, evolved from the 1870 bequest of Thomas Martin, a prominent business leader known in and beyond Giles County. In his will, he fulfilled a promise made to his daughter, Victoria, to establish a school for young women. In its early years, Martin Female College operated as a four-year boarding college with an elementary division for the town’s children. After becoming the property of the Tennessee Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1905, the institution was renamed Martin College. In 1938, the school became coeducational and, by 1966, was the first private college in Tennessee to become racially integrated. Martin Methodist College, affiliated with the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church, became an accredited four-year college in 1995, and its current enrollment is just over eight hundred.

The main campus of eighteen acres, located two blocks from the Pulaski square, is comprised largely of buildings built since the 1950s. The gymnasium, completed in 1931, is being renovated into a fine arts center for the college and the community. An additional forty-four acres, just one and a half miles from the main campus, is being developed as an athletic complex. MMC offers more than twenty-six majors, emphasis areas, and pre-professional programs through its academic divisions of Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics and Sciences, and Social Sciences. In 1999, the Center for Church Leadership was established by Martin Methodist College as part of its mission as a church-related institution of higher education.