Rhodes College: From Clarksville to the Supreme Court

The Gothic stone campus just north of here has been part of Memphis for just over a century, but the college itself is considerably older. Rhodes College was founded in eighteen forty-eight in Clarksville, Tennessee, as the Masonic University of Tennessee, and passed to Presbyterian control in eighteen fifty-five under the name Stewart College. For decades it was a small Clarksville institution, shaped by the evangelical educational mission that drove so much college-founding in the antebellum South.

The transformation came in nineteen twenty-five, when president Charles Diehl led the move to Memphis. The city offered funding, and the college needed a larger future. Diehl chose a Collegiate Gothic design for the new campus, the pointed arches and carved limestone that make it feel more like Oxford than Tennessee, and that aesthetic has held: every major building added in the hundred years since has matched the original style, making it one of the most architecturally coherent campuses in the country.

The college took its current name in nineteen eighty-four to honor Peyton Nalle Rhodes, Diehl's successor as president. What the name change could not capture is the institution's outsized legal legacy. Two of its graduates have served as Associate Justices of the United States Supreme Court. Abe Fortas, class of nineteen thirty, was appointed by Lyndon Johnson in nineteen sixty-five and became one of the most influential justices of his era before resigning under financial controversy in nineteen sixty-nine. Amy Coney Barrett, class of nineteen ninety-four, was confirmed to the court in two thousand twenty. Two Supreme Court justices from a single liberal arts college of under two thousand students in Memphis is a record almost no institution can match.