The Southwest Missouri Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, founded the school as Neosho Seminary in 1878.
[5] Nathan Scarritt, D.D., of Kansas City, Missouri was a minister as well as a millionaire real estate developer and banker.
Brown spent his efforts promoting the school in his evangelical revivals,[7] establishing the Neosho Chautauqua to bring speakers to the campus in the summer,[9] and through the newspapers: he wrote for The Herald, a local weekly newspaper, and later bought the Neosho Free Press and merged the two papers.
The Hall family asked the Conference to divert the endowment to a fund to build a memorial church in honor of their son, in Carthage, Missouri.
[11] However, some of the Scarritt board of trustee members refused saying that when the money was originally given, the Halls specified that it be used for a learning institution, not a church.
In 1915, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled on this dispute (Catron v. Scarritt Collegiate Inst.
Scarritt Collegiate Institute was attended by cowboy philosopher and humorist Will Rogers for a single semester in the late 1890s before his transfer to Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri.