Its mascot is the Scots, and sports teams compete in NCAA Division III athletics in the Collegiate Conference of the South.

[1] Maryville College was founded as the Southern and Western Theological Seminary in 1819 by Isaac L. Anderson, a Presbyterian minister.

Anderson had founded a school, Union Academy, in nearby Knox County, before becoming minister at New Providence Presbyterian Church in Maryville.

He expressed to his fellow clergy the need for more ministers in the community, including a request to the Home Missionary Society and an appeal to divinity students at Princeton University in 1819.

It opened with a class of five men, and the new school was adopted by the Synod of Tennessee and formally named the Southern and Western Theological Seminary in October 1819.

[3] After receiving its charter from the Tennessee General Assembly in 1842, the school adopted its current name: Maryville College.

[6] Maryville College was closed during the Civil War, but, upon reopening, it again admitted students regardless of race, assisted by the Freedmen's Bureau.

Swift was founded by William Henderson Franklin, the first African American to graduate from Maryville College (1880).

After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Maryville College immediately re-enrolled African Americans.

Coinciding with the World's Fair in Knoxville, the experiment tested the efficiency of burning wood waste as an energy source.