Morehead State University: A Light to the Mountains

Morehead State University sits in the foothills of the Appalachian coalfields in eastern Kentucky, a region that for much of the nineteenth century had almost no access to formal education. The school's origins lie in a single act of faith by a minister and his mother who believed that literacy could change the mountains.

In the fall of eighteen eighty-seven, Dr. Frank C. Button and his mother Phebe, both affiliated with the United Christian Missionary Society out of Saint Louis, opened what they called Morehead Normal School. Classes began on October third in a rented house with exactly one student: a young woman named Annie Page. The school's mission was to train teachers for a region where the nearest institution of higher learning might be a day's ride away.

For more than three decades, the Buttons kept the school running on donations and determination. It served the children of coal miners, subsistence farmers, and the scattered Appalachian communities that could not easily reach Lexington or Louisville. The private school's resources were always thin, and it finally closed in the spring of nineteen twenty-two.

But the Kentucky legislature stepped in. The General Assembly established Morehead State Normal School as a public institution in nineteen twenty-two, and the first state-sponsored students arrived in the fall of nineteen twenty-three. The school graduated its first class in nineteen twenty-seven. In nineteen twenty-six it became a teachers college, in nineteen forty-eight a state college, and in nineteen sixty-six a university.

Today Morehead State serves roughly ten thousand students and is the primary four-year institution for a large swath of eastern Kentucky. It carries a particular weight in a region where going to college has often meant leaving home and sometimes not coming back. The Buttons' phrase, a light to the mountains, remains the university's informal motto, a description that still fits.