Andrew College
Cuthbert, Randolph County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Andrew College. Cuthbert is the Site of Andrew College, founded here January 1854. named in honor of Bishop James O. Andrew whose refusal to free his Wife's slaves separated the Northern and Southern Methodist Episcopal Churches (1844). First President - Augustus Alden, of Yale, a pioneer in Georgia for higher education. The second college chartered to confer graduate degrees upon women. Served as a Confederate Hospital 1863-65. The first women's college in the South to include Physical Education in its curriculum (1867). Today, a fully accredited Junior College, it has upheld throughout a century the highest principles of educated, Christian womanhood. GHM 120-5 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1953
Erected by Georgia Historical Commission
The Story
Founded at Cuthbert in January 1854, Andrew College was named for Bishop James O. Andrew, whose refusal to free his wife's slaves helped split the Methodist Episcopal Church North and South in 1844. Led first by Yale-educated Augustus Alden, it was the second college chartered to confer degrees on women and served as a Confederate hospital in 1863–65. In 1867 it became the first women's college in the South to include physical education in its curriculum.
Why it matters
Andrew College reflects both the pioneering expansion of women's higher education in the South and the way the nation's crisis over slavery fractured even its churches.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, the American South was booming and dividing at the same time. Cotton wealth was building towns and funding ambitions, and one of those ambitions was education — including, remarkably for the era, the higher education of women. At a time when most colleges were closed to them entirely, a scattering of Southern institutions began offering women a real course of study, and the little town of Cuthbert, in the Georgia plantation belt, became home to one of the boldest of these experiments.
But the same decade was pulling the country apart along the fault line of slavery, and the rupture was not only political. It reached into the pews. Even the great national churches, which many had hoped might hold the Union together by moral force, were splitting North from South over the question of whether a Christian could own human beings.
Andrew College was founded in January 1854 squarely at that intersection — a school for the education of women, named for a bishop whose personal entanglement with slavery had already helped fracture one of the country's largest churches a decade before.
People & events
The college took its name from Bishop James O. Andrew, and the story behind that name is the story of a national rupture in miniature. In 1844, Andrew's refusal to free enslaved people who had come to him through his wife became the flashpoint that separated the Northern and Southern branches of the Methodist Episcopal Church. A single bishop's household became a test case for whether a church could tolerate slaveholding among its leaders — and the answer split the denomination in two.
To lead its new college, Cuthbert reached far north for a scholar: Augustus Alden of Yale, who became the first president and a pioneer of higher education in Georgia. Under men like him the school did something genuinely uncommon — it became, the marker records, the second college chartered to confer graduate degrees upon women, at a moment when many doubted women should hold degrees at all.
Then the war came, and the college did what countless Southern institutions did: it turned its halls over to the wounded, serving as a Confederate hospital from 1863 to 1865. When peace returned, the school kept innovating. In 1867 it became the first women's college in the South to include physical education in its curriculum — a small revolution in an age that often treated women as too delicate for exertion.
Its place in the American story
Andrew College sits at the crossing of two of the largest currents in nineteenth-century American life. One is the slow, contested opening of higher education to women — a movement that would eventually remake universities, professions, and public life across the whole country. That a Southern college was chartering women to earn advanced degrees in the 1850s, and putting them in the gymnasium by 1867, is a reminder that this story did not belong to one region alone.
The other current is the way the crisis over slavery fractured not just the political Union but the moral institutions Americans trusted to hold them together. The Methodist split that gave the college its namesake foreshadowed the national split to come; when even the churches could not stay whole, the country's own coming division was written on the wall.
To find both of those national stories braided into the founding of one small Georgia college is what makes the site worth a traveler's attention. It shows how the grandest forces in American history landed in particular towns, on particular campuses, in the lives of particular students.
If you visit
Cuthbert is a Randolph County town where the pace is unhurried, and the college marker rewards a slow read. Notice how much national history is packed into a few lines — a church schism, a Yale scholar come south, degrees for women, a wartime hospital, a gymnasium first. Each clause is a doorway.
Let the name itself be your starting point. Standing before a marker to Andrew College, remember that the bishop it honors is remembered here for the very act — refusing to free enslaved people — that helped split his church. The marker doesn't hide that tension, and neither should you as you stand there; it's part of what makes the place honest.
Then let your imagination populate the campus with its students: young women pursuing degrees in an era that scarcely permitted it, and, for two grim years, wounded soldiers filling the same rooms. If a Georgia road trip is taking you through the plantation belt, a pause here reframes the whole region — a country of cotton and conflict was also, improbably, a country building classrooms for women.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Bishop James O. Andrew
- · Augustus Alden
Related events
- · Founding of Andrew College, 1854
Themes & tags
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