Lost Mansions of Mississippi, Volume II

Mount Hermon

{ 57 } Mississippi College is the oldest existing collegiate -level school in the state, tracing its roots all the way back to Hampstead Academy in 1826. The citizens of Mt. Salus, frustrated in their attempt to claim designation as the capital city, made a conscious corporate decision to emphasize education and hope for a later designation as Mississippi’s university center. With that purpose in mind,Hampstead was opened as a school for young men and soon had its name changed to Mississippi Academy. Only the approval of the legislature was necessary for its transformation into the University of Mississippi. Unfortunately for the ambitious leaders of this tiny town which would soon be known as Clinton, they weren’t unique in their scheme. When the legislature at last passed an 1841 bill to charter the state university, forty-eight communities lined up for the honor of hosting it. The list was narrowed to seven sites, and Clinton was once again snubbed. Mississippi Academy dwindled, only to be revived by the Presbyterian Church and eventually the Baptist Convention. The name was subsequently changed to Mississippi College, and only the Civil War has disrupted classes since 1850. A stone’s throw northeast of Mississippi College , Central Female Institute was opened as the women’s equivalent in 1853. Run by Dr. and Mrs. Walter Hillman for almost fifty years, this Baptist-affiliated school grew to include several huge academic and dormitory buildings, most of which were still standing when the renamed Hillman College merged with Mississippi College in 1945. Twenty years later, the Clinton Lions Club launched a campaign to convert the site into a city park, and the remaining buildings were demolished. As late as the 1980s, concrete foundations and half-buried bricks could still be found throughout Hillman-Berry Park. Thesewerecollegesthatarereveredandfondly remembered, documented in photographs and memorialized in roadside plaques. But not too far from Mississippi College and Hillman College , just beyond the old Clinton Depot, there was another school, one that struggled every day of its existence and whose founder lies buried in a weed-choked graveyard which has long since been reclaimed by the woods. Mount Hermon Female Seminary was the culmination of one woman’s dream and gritty determination, an oasis of education in a former planter’s mansion that has been almost completely forgotten in the eight decades since its closure. Sarah Dickey was an Ohio native, born in the 1840s into a family who limited her educational opportunities as effectively as the slave girls she would someday teach. At the age of thirteen, Dickey was just learning to read; it would be three more years before she found someone to Mount Hermon • • • { 58 } MoUnt HerMon teachher to write.Shewas determined to take up teaching as a profession, and in those less structured times she managed to collect a teacher’s certificate of some authenticity. She also joined the abolitionist Church of United Brethren in Christ, one of several mission-minded northern denominations who took it as their sacred cause to educate the masses of freedmen wandering the ravaged South with no skills and no hope. Leaders of the United Brethren had been searching for an appropriate site to open a school for emancipated slaves when word began to trickle north of General Pemberton’s surrender at Vicksburg. Thousands of “contraband” blacks were filling the streets, suddenly adrift with no masters, no education, and no direction. Two United Brethren preachers scouted out the situation , located an abandoned church building, and sent word back to Ohio to ship three new teachers to Mississippi.One of those rookie educators was twenty-five-year-old Sarah Dickey. Miss Dickey stepped off a steamboat at the Vicksburg waterfront on December 11, 1863. Facing her was a recently devastated town which was just beginning to recover from the shock of a forty-nine-day siege, when many of the citizens holed up in dank caves and subsisted on rat and mule meat. The muddy streets were clogged with soldiers and wagons and hopeful blacks, three hundred of whom had scraped up fifteen cents each as tuition for the promised United Brethren school. They were not discouraged by their schoolhouse,a bloodstained Baptist church with smashed windows at the corner of Crawford and Walnut streets. Within six months of their arrival, Sarah and her two fellow teachers were inundated with more than seven hundred pupils. Most were recently freed slaves but some were Union soldiers, eager to learn the simplest of academic skills. Recognizing...