History
Marion Military Institute traces its origins back to 1842 with the creation of Howard College. In 1842, Howard English & Classical School, later known as Howard College, was established in Marion, Alabama, by the Alabama Baptist Convention, with Dr. S. S. Sherman as President. During the American Civil War South Barracks (later known as Old South Barracks and now Lovelace Hall), built in 1854, & the Chapel, built in 1857, served the Confederacy as Breckenridge Military Hospital from 1863 to 1865. Along with the President's House (built 1912), these buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1887, the decision was made to move Howard College (now Samford University) to Birmingham. The then President of Howard College, Colonel J.T. Murfee, LL.D., and a handful of faculty and students decided to remain in Marion, Alabama and immediately reorganized and founded Marion Military Institute, a military preparatory high school and college. The United States Army ROTC program was first offered at MMI in 1916, when the institute was designated as an "Honor Military School with Distinction" by the United States Department of Defense. The U.S. Army Early Commissioning Program was established at MMI in 1968. In 1971 MMI became coeducational.
In March 2006, the Alabama state legislature passed a resolution placing MMI under the auspices of the Alabama Department of Postsecondary Education. MMI became "The State Military College of Alabama". As part of the transition to a public institution, Marion phased out its high school program. In May 2009, the last high school class graduated from Marion Military Institute's Preparatory School Program, a program that traced its origins back to 1887.
Read more about this topic: Marion Military Institute
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)