HISTORY CORNER

WARD-BELMONT’S BEGINNINGS

BY RIDLEY WILLS II

On Sept. 25, 1913, Ward-Belmont opened on the 49th year of Ward Seminary and the 24th year of Belmont College. The school’s president was John D. Blanton. Jennie Taylor Masson, the Ward-Belmont registrar, put an advertisement in a Monteagle Sunday School bulletin about its summer schools. She gives a rather complete description of the school and its faculty.

In the school’s academic department, there were 20 teachers, graduates or postgraduates of Toronto University, Vassar, Wellesley,Bryn Mawr, Smith, Goucher, Chicago University, Vanderbilt, Michigan, and Columbia- a most impressive list. Ward-Belmont was, according to its registrar, “the most complete, modern and thoroughly equipped Boarding School for Girls and Young Women in the South, and equal to the best in America.”

The School of Music, the most expensively maintained in any such school in the country, had, in 1913, 17 teachers of piano, voice, violin, other stringed instruments and pipe organ.

Ward-Belmont also offered Schools of Expression, Domestic Science and Home Economy; and Art, which provided the best training in painting, drawing and designing.

In 1913, Ward-Belmont featured a superb gymnasium and swimming pool with gymnastics a specialty and a course in physical education.

All rooms for boarding students were “outside rooms, commodious and attractive.”

Classes were small with one resident teacher for every 10 resident students.

John D. Blanton, president of Ward-Belmont, had come to Nashville in 1892 as a teacher and vice-president of Ward’s Seminary. His influence was strongly felt in the civic, religious, educational and fraternal life of the city.

In 1928, he would be named Nashville’s most outstanding citizen. Dr. Blanton served as president of the Tennessee College Association,and vice-president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. A devoted member of First Presbyterian Church, he died in October of1933 at age 74 of pneumonia, which developed during an asthma attack.