It was founded in 1866 as the Nashville Normal and Theological Institute by the American Baptist denomination, which established numerous schools and colleges in the South.

In 1866, the Baptist Home Mission Board sponsored selected African-American men for the first classes here, including Hardin Smith and Martin Winfield from Haywood County, Tennessee.

After they returned to their home communities of Nutbush and Brownsville, respectively, they became ministers and founded several Baptist churches in the area, as well as the first school for freedmen in the county.

News stories contained suggestions of incendiary origin..."[5] The campus was sold by developers posing as a Christian missionary agency, under a restrictive covenant barring African Americans from living on the land.

In 1929, the university, already afflicted by financial problems made worse by the stock market crash of 1929, ceased operations; students and faculty were moved to Howe Institute, in Memphis (today LeMoyne–Owen College).