Madison reproduces itself
by Albert Dittes
When the Madison pioneers began their work in 1904, their goal was to train families to go out and start similar institutions in other parts of the underprivileged highland South.
George I. Butler, president of the Southern Union Conference of SDA, summed up their mission.
“These workers have fully declared to us that they do not expect any pecuniary assistance from the conference, but have come to do a self-supporting work,— to put up their own buildings, cultivate the land, go out and canvass for books, and thus pay their way; to take in those of more or less experience as assistants, to go through the preliminary work of education, and become self-supporting laborers to go out in various localities in the South, where poor educational facilities exist, procure land, start schools, invite in pupils, teach these how to raise crops, fruit, etc., and do work on intelligent plans. These teachers are to be thoroughly instructed in the work, and are to establish churches in these various localities, exerting an influence on behalf of morality, agricultural training, self-supporting industry, and the blessed truth of our Lord Jesus Christ, being true missionaries in this great Southern field.”
Arthur G. Daniells, president of the General Conference of SDA, stated the need for such a lay movement in a mission field close to home.
“There is a strange problem in a section of the United States. In a country with “widespread educational facilities, with compulsory education laws which are supposed to be of universal application, is found a large number of people, living in practical isolation, with almost no opportunities for gaining an education or for learning anything about the gospel. Their land is poor, their methods are primitive, and they have no market for their produce, so they are poor as well as ignorant.
After finding the place for their model school, Professors Sutherland and Magan invited their Berrien Springs students and staff to come. Among those responding were Charles F. Alden, O.A. Wolcott, Calvin Kinsman, George Alcorn (and wife), Ernest Dunn, E. E. Brink, and the Misses Shannon, Ashton and Abegg.
The first students to go out on their own from Madison--Calvin Kinsman and Orin Wolcott--went to Cuba despite the school leaders encouraging them to start a school in the South. In March, 1906, Charles Alden and Braden Mulford raised enough money to purchase 250 acres about 15 miles north of Nashville on the Highland Rim. This first extension school of Madison taught community children as well as farming methods to people in the community.
A year later, Braden Mulford persuaded some friends and relatives to help him buy a farm a few miles away near Fountain Head, Tennessee. His sister and her husband--Mr. and Mrs. Forrest West--joined him there, and he married Miss Pearl West, sister of Forrest West and a trained school teacher. Their enterprise eventually developed into Highland Academy, noq conference school serving the Kentucky-Tennessee Conference.
The next year, 1908, two families--Mr. And Mrs. Herman Walen and Mr. and Mrs. George Wallace and their children purchased a farm near Portland, Tennessee, and started a school, later sanitarium in the hill country there.
Other medical missionary enterprises started, such as a Polk Street settlement and cafeterna and treatment rooms in Nashville. A Hillcrest School for black children began about four and a half miles out of Nashville in 1907.
An Adventst school in Hendersonville, N.C. named Fletcher Academy started by people not affiliated with Madison, found its objectives to be the same and joined the Madison family. Other early schools started in Sand Mountain in northern Alabama and Mount Pisgah Academy near Asheville, N.C. in 1913. Glen Alpine Rural School also served North Carolina. The Graves, Reese and Bechtel families started Madison-related medical, educational and agricultural work near Lawrenceburg, Tenn. The Martin family started out in Bon Aqua, Tenn., and later founded a sanitarium and later nursing home named El Reposo in Florence, Alabama. A wealthy woman from California donated money for a school in Reeves, Ga., which later became Georgia-Cumberland Academy.
An institution 17 miles outside of Louisville, Kentucky began in 1924 and became known as Pewee Valley with a school and sanitarium.
Cafeteria work in Birmingham, Ala., began in 1918, and a school and sanitarium started outside the city in the early 1930s.
Mrs. Lida Funk Scott, heiress to the Funk & Wagnalls fortune, accelerated this extension movement after joining the Madison family in 1914 and eventually took charge of it. She transferred her entire fortune to The Layman Foundation, chartered January 4, 1924, which made loans and held title to the properties of these institutions. Because of their need for physicians, Mrs. Scott, with the encouragement of Dr. Sutherland, donated large sums of money to the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University) to help it attain full accreditation.
The work of Madison continued spreading. In the early 1920s, Madison co founder Nellie Druillard used substantial money she obtained from a profitable real-estate transaction to start Riverside Sanitariumin Nashville, Tennessee, to train nurses and minister to the black community. Pine Forest Academy near Meridian, Mississippi, began in the late 1930s, and two Madison families started Little Creek Academy near Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early 1940s.
To help give mutual strength and encouragement to the workers in all Madison-family institutions, they started hosting annual conventions for workers after the close of summer school in 1908. The November 6-9 annual convention in 1941 listed 52 representative self-supporting enterprises in eight states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The listing included eight treatment rooms and 27 institutions run by 171 families. Tennessee had the most representation with 17 with North Carolina the second highest with 14.
The success of the Madison-affiliated units inspired General Conference leaders to use them as a model for encouraging Adventist families to leave the cities for the country and invited newly-retired Dr. E.A. Sutherland to head up a Commission on Rural Living. The 1946 convention of self-supporting institutions at Madison approved a plan to form an association for mutual assistance which self-supporting groups in any part of North America could join. ”They sent on to the Fall Council calling on it to organize an Association of Self-Supporting Institutions.”
Representatives of the Southern Union self-supporting workers, along with lay persons from other parts of North America, met in Cincinnati on March 5, 1947, and organized the Association of Self-Supporting Institutions, later known as ASI. The first officers were Dr. E.A. Sutherland, president; Dr. Wendell Malin, vice president and Dr. J. Wayne McFarland, secretary-treasurer. The charter members were mostly Madison-affiliated, but the organization later broadened itself to include Adventist business people. The current official name is Adventist-laymen’s Services and Industries (ASI) and has an annual convention attracting hundreds of Adventist lay persons.
While Madison College closed in 1964, the self-supporting model of establishing and operating rural centers of activity which combine agriculture, educational advantages and medical institutions has never died. New self-supporting enterprises in the form of schools and clinics are still in operation or getting started.
For example, Harbert Hills Academy of Savannah, Tenn., was the last actual “unit” of Madison to start in the 1950s.
Two grandchildren of old Madison, Heritage Academy of Monterey, Tenn., and Laurelbrook School of Dayton, Tenn., started through the influence of Little Creek Academy. Other newer schools drawing inspiration from Madison are Oklahoma Academy in Harrah, Okla., and Ouachita Hills Academy And College in Amity, Ark.. One of the newest Enterprises calls itself “a 21st-century Madison College” and operates under the name of Madison Missions Australia Ltd.
The E.A. Sutherland Education Association (Now known as Intersecting Scripture, Educators and Inspiration or ISEI) was organized to accredited these self-supporting schools and now helps maintain the standards of 15 schools in four countries of the world.
So the Madison education model is still very much alive.
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