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:
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)