[1] The institution was established in 1872 with the aid of John Moffatt, a Scottish-born temperance preacher and landowner.
[2] It was Moffat and business partner Oliver Maybee who convinced Fairmount's first headmistresses, Louise Yerger and Harriet B. Kells,[3] to move their girls' school from Jackson, Mississippi to Tennessee.
Silas McBee, who later gained fame as an author and architect, became the principal of Fairmount College in the late 1800s.
McBee turned the school into a church institution that might be "for girls what Sewanee was for young men".
[4] In 1921, Reverend William Stirling Claiborne and Dr. Mercer P. Logan founded the DuBose Memorial Church Training School (later, DuBose Conference Center) on the school's former site.