Madison story for encyclopedia

The Madison Story

The school-farm-sanitarium complex called the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute (N.A.N.I.), later more commonly known as Madison College, started in 1904 in Madison Tennessee.

Professors E.A. Sutherland and P.T. Magan, president and dean respectively of Emmanuel Missionary College (now Andrews University) in Berrien Springs, Michigan, had resigned their positions due to disagreements with the board and went to Nashville, Tennessee, to look for a remote place in the mountains to apply the Ellen White inspired educational reforms by operating on a farm and later adding a sanitarium. Ellen White happened to be there visiting her son, James Edson White, and told them their plan was wrong, saying they needed to locate in the Nashville area because it was a center of influence and recommended they buy a farm about 12 miles out of town in nearby Madison. After much soul-searching, they decided to do so and follow her divine guidelines.

“The object of the new, model school was to provide an institution offering practical training to men and women who desired to use their educational ability to uplift work in needy communities,” stated a 1916 N.A.N.I. annual report. “Several of those who formed the nucleus of the company at Madison were already acquainted with conditions in the mountain sections of the South, and they felt that the southern states offered unusual opportunities for the development of a system of education which closely connects the home and the school.”

They then went back to Berrien Springs and found students willing to go south to prepare themselves to start rural schools for underprivileged people in an area still recovering from the Civil War.

They began on the farm, devoting half of the workday to agricultural work and the other half to the classroom. Their inspirations came from the Ellen White recommendations to dignify manual labor along with intellectual development. The philosophy of a General Armstrong in developing Hampton Institute in Virginia to help teach Negroes how to adapt to life after slavery also inspired them. His most famous graduate, Booker T. Washington, studied the primitive condition of the Negro mostly in the fields and felt that teaching them just book learning would be unproductive, that they must have a knowledge of useful practical labor in order to be fitted to fully take care of themselves and become a part of society. The Madison founders followed this model rather than the New England approach to education.

The characteristic feature of initial Madison education reform consisted of three-week short courses of practical classes taught four times during the year combining textbook work and demonstrations. One short course in carpentry began work on two four-room cottages. Another one taught how to make furniture in the cabinet shop, with students turning out a library table and several chest of drawers. The agriculture class taught about garden products as well as actually growing them.

"Had all our schools encouraged work in agricultural lines, they would now have an altogether different showing. . . . Some [teachers] do not appreciate the value of agricultural work. These should not plan for our schools; for these will hold everything' from advancing in the right lines. In the past their influence has been a hindrance."— Testimonies for the Church, Vol. VI, pp, 117, 118.

Other short courses featured making dresses, aprons and undergarments. The gardening classes also featured proper soil and plant preparation. Students additionally learned blacksmithing and the raising of livestock as well as cooking, dietetics, and domestic science. Madison also taught its students to meet the various conditions of rural community life with hygiene and sanitation,as well as simple, rational methods of treatment for the more ordinary diseases.

“The program of the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute is an adaptation of the school program to the normal activities of the farm and the home,”reported E.A. Sutherland in his 1916 annual report. That meant maintaining “a healthful social life on the farm conducive to physical, intellectual, and spiritual development.”

Or, instead of growing one crop, the goal was to have the farm produce as much of the food as the school community consumed as possible.

Fully training its students to start self-supporting schools in the south required teaching them to support themselves while in school. Or, as Dr. Sutherland put it, “these students must receive here in the training school lessons in independent thought, in leadership, and in the power of initiative.”

The students thus met their school expenses by work and participated in “a system of self-government which puts every student on his honor and encourages him to assist every other member of the institution in maintaining a high standard of Christian integrity and conduct.”

The students and teachers worked together to handle everyday issues of school and farm management.

Such a program required teachers not only to be expert in the classroom subjects but also skilled in the industrial arts. When Madison started, the staff found that to make it possible for students to work their way through school, they must work for $13 a month ($1,016.70 now). Campus industries enabling the students to earn their keep included farming, gardening, fruit-raising, beekeeping, dairying, stock-and- poultry-raising, sheep and goats, carpentry, tool-repairing, food-factory, cooking, baking, laundering, sewing, tailoring, weaving, printing, nursing and the Sanitarium.

“I can sum up all the activities of the place by saying that all the work is carried on by the student body and its teachers,” said E.A. Sutherland in a 1920 annual report to the Southern Union constituency. “We hire no outside help. We build our own shelter, lay the brick, build the chimneys, the foundations, and the cement walks; raise the food, cook it, manufacture it for the market; train cooks for schools and cafeterias and send them out to open up establishments of their own. The only vegetarian cafeterias in the Southern Union Conference are conducted by Madison educated people; the same is true of city treatment rooms and rural sanitariums, of which there are three in this Union Conference.”

In moving their college from Battle Creek to Berrien Springs the Madison pioneers had been able to have a farm and other industries but could not build a sanitarium. While having to start out on a farm at Madison, Sutherland always had a sanitarium for medical missionary training in mind. Ellen White had said that a school and sanitarium should be located together whenever possible. They dedicated the Madison Rural Sanitarium in 1908, and it became an important part of the overall program.

“The medical work of Madison as represented by the Sanitarium is a factor of no small importance in the training of workers,” Sutherland added in this same report. “Students come in contact with the outside world in a way that helps them build character and which is better for them than to remain wholly with our own people. At Madison, practically everyone has a nurse’s training or the elements of that training in our courses in simple treatments, accidents and emergencies, etc. We are also following the plan of teaching men to cook and women to use tools.”

The sanitarium also brought in money that subsidized the school, and Madison College grew to maturity in the 1920s through the 1940s with a food factory, some related industries, farm and sanitarium. World War II took away many of its male students and the ones going there after the war went mainly to train for personal careers--many of them medical--rather than to start self-supporting schools, although some did. The sanitarium and hospital building started aging during the 1950s, with parts of the original 1908 building still part of the structure. Due to subsidizing the college, the sanitarium could not keep up its physical facility to meet state codes. Being forced to build a new building, sanitarium earnings that had subsidized the college had to go to pay for a new structure, and that forced a closing of the college in 1964.

The Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute complex has since operated as a day school serving the Nashville-area Seventh-day Adventist churches.

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