Southern Adventist University: Faith, Farms, and Collegedale

The small community of Collegedale, tucked between Chattanooga and the Georgia border, was not a town until a church school needed a place to land.

Southern Adventist University traces its roots to eighteen ninety-two, when a Seventh-day Adventist minister named George Colcord founded Graysville Academy in a tiny school above a general store in the Tennessee mountains. It was the first Adventist school in the entire South. For more than two decades it struggled with cramped quarters and limited resources, until church leaders decided it needed a fresh start somewhere new.

In nineteen sixteen, a relocation committee searched for a secluded site with good farmland and access to a railroad stop. They found what they were looking for on a farm belonging to Jim Thatcher, in a hollow near Ooltewah. The school moved there and named the new settlement Collegedale, a community that would grow up entirely around the institution.

The school's philosophy was built on physical labor alongside academic study. Students worked the surrounding farms and operated campus industries as part of their education, a model that kept tuition low and rooted the community in self-sufficiency. The institution grew slowly: it became a junior college in nineteen sixteen, a four-year college in nineteen forty-four, and finally Southern Adventist University in nineteen ninety-six, when it began conferring graduate degrees.

Today the university enrolls roughly three thousand students and operates one of the nation's largest Adventist healthcare programs, reflecting the denomination's long emphasis on medicine and wellness alongside faith.

Collegedale itself exists almost entirely because of the school. It incorporated as a city in nineteen fifty-one, and the university and the town have grown together ever since, a quiet experiment in community-building that started above a general store in the Tennessee hills.