Lees-McRae College: A Minister's Mountain School
Near Banner Elk, North Carolina
In the heart of Banner Elk stands Lees-McRae College, a small campus with a large history. It began with a young Presbyterian minister named Edgar Tufts, who arrived in these remote mountains in eighteen ninety-seven hoping to found a congregation. Concerned that local children had almost no schooling beyond a bare district school, Tufts took a handful of young people into his own study in the winter of eighteen ninety-nine for extra instruction.
That small group, remembered as the Class of nineteen hundred, marks the founding of the college. Tufts first named the school the Elizabeth McRae Institute for Girls, honoring a devoted teacher from South Carolina. In nineteen oh five he added a boys department and honored a benefactor, misses S.
P. Lees of Kentucky and New York, giving the school the paired name it still carries. Tufts was building far more than a school.
By the time he died in nineteen twenty-three, his Appalachian ministry had also created Grace Hospital and an orphanage caring for one hundred children. The institute became Lees-McRae College in nineteen thirty-one, first as a junior college, and in nineteen ninety it grew into a full four-year institution. Today it educates students in the same mountain valley where one minister's evening tutoring session quietly began.
