The building is located on West Chulahoma Avenue in Holly Springs, a small town in Marshall County, Mississippi, in the American South.

[3] The building was home to a medical and law school run by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South from 1839 to 1843.

[3] In 1847, Reverend Samuel McKinney, an Irish-born Presbyterian minister, opened the Chalmers Institute, a boys' school.

[3][5] Prominent former students included George Clifton Myers (1852-1934), an influential clerk of the Mississippi Supreme Court,[6] and Confederate Colonel William F. Taylor, who became a prosperous cotton commissioner in the post-bellum South.

[5] In the aftermath of the American Civil War, the school reopened under the leadership of Professor W. A. Anderson until 1869.

[3] In 2009, it was acquired by Preserve Marshall County/Holly Springs Inc., a preservationist organization whose aim is to save and restore the building.