Barber-Scotia College
Concord, Cabarrus County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Barber Scotia College. Presbyterian. Est. 1867 by Luke Dorland to educate Negro women, Scotia Seminary merged in 1930 with Barber Memorial Institute. Coed since 1954.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
Founded in 1867 by the Rev. Luke Dorland under Presbyterian auspices, Scotia Seminary set out to educate Black women in the wake of emancipation. In 1930 it merged with the Barber Memorial Institute to form Barber-Scotia College, and it opened to men in 1954. For generations it trained teachers and leaders across the segregated South.
Why it matters
Barber-Scotia stands among the historically Black colleges that gave freedpeople and their descendants access to higher education denied elsewhere.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Luke Dorland
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mont Amoena Seminary
Mount Pleasant, NC
Founded on the eve of the Civil War, Mont Amoena Seminary gave young women in the Carolina Piedmont a formal education at a time when few schools would. Run by the Lutheran church, it took a Latinized version of its hometown's name — "Pleasant Mountain" — and educated girls for nearly seventy years, closing in the 1920s. It stood as the counterpart to the men's colleges just up the street in Mount Pleasant.
Livingstone College
Salisbury, NC
Founded in 1879 as Zion Wesley Institute by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, this school became Livingstone College in 1885 and was named for the British missionary and explorer David Livingstone. Under the Rev. Joseph Charles Price, its president from 1882 to 1893, it grew into a leading center for educating African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. It stands five blocks west.
Queens University of Charlotte
Charlotte, NC
Founded in 1857 as the Charlotte Female Institute, this Presbyterian school was one of many Southern academies established to educate young women in an era when higher learning was largely closed to them. It relocated to this Myers Park campus in 1915 as Charlotte grew into a regional hub, and opened its doors to men in 1987. The institution's long arc traces the changing place of women and church-founded colleges in American education.
Mitchell College
Statesville, NC
Founded in 1856 as a college for women and affiliated with the Presbyterian church until 1959, Mitchell College brought higher education to young women of Statesville well before it was common. It later evolved with the times, gaining state community college status in 1973. For more than a century it has served the education of the region.