Castle Heights Military Academy: Where Boys Came to Be Made Into Something

Castle Heights School opened outside Lebanon, Tennessee, in nineteen oh two, founded by two former teachers and a university president as a college preparatory school for boys and girls. On the first day, ninety-four boarding students and fifty-nine day students enrolled. The school was known for strict discipline: cigarettes were forbidden, there were no saloons nearby, and tuition ran three hundred twenty-five dollars a year.

In nineteen eighteen it converted to a full military academy. By the nineteen twenties it was struggling financially, and in nineteen twenty-eight the health entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden bought it for one hundred thousand dollars, and his foundation ran it until nineteen seventy-four. The academy closed permanently in nineteen eighty-six after eight decades as a preparatory institution.

Several of its original buildings survive in Lebanon.