Clinton: Mississippi's Oldest College and a Civil War Flashpoint
Near Jackson, Mississippi
Clinton was founded in eighteen twenty-three under the name Mount Salus, and it grew quickly. In January eighteen twenty-six, residents chartered Hampstead Academy, which would be renamed Mississippi College by eighteen thirty. That makes it the oldest college in Mississippi.
In eighteen thirty-one, the school became the first institution of higher learning in the United States to grant a degree to a woman, awarding diplomas to Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall. Forty years later, in May of eighteen sixty-three, General Ulysses Grant's army marched through Clinton en route to Vicksburg, part of the campaign that would crack the Confederacy in two. Renamed Mississippi Christian University in its bicentennial year, the school enrolls more than six thousand students and remains the largest private university in the state.
