Boscobel College

Boscobel College for Young Ladies was a college in Nashville, founded in 1889 as the Nashville Baptist Female College by the Tennessee Baptist Convention. The college operated for twenty-five years — until 1914. One of its founding objectives was to provide the lowest possible cost for higher-education of young women.

The school, at its peak in the 1890s, had over 100 female students, many of whom were boarders. In 1898, Boscobel advertised its literary faculty and music and art advantages as unsurpassed, and promised to prepare young ladies for life's work and its duties.

The campus was built around an East Nashville mansion, formerly owned by Anna Shelby Williams. The mansion was constructed of blue-burned brick with marble mantles from Italy and stood atop a tree-covered hill overlooking the Cumberland River. The campus covered ten wooded acres on Sevier Street near South Seventh Street (then called Foster Street), south of Sylvan Street.

Boscobal was the same name given to the property by John Shelby, who built the original mansion for his daughter, Anna Shelby Williams.

In 1918, the property became home to the National Baptist Seminary and Missionary Training School, which functioned until 1931. In 1940 the buildings were razed and sold for scrap. Much of the site of the old school is now the James A. Cayce Homes, Nashville 's oldest and largest public housing development.

For reasons not fully understood today, Boscobel College closed in 1914. One possible reason was a rising popularity of coeducation. Other local schools for females closed during this same era: Radnor College in 1914, Buford College in 1920, Columbia's Athenaeum college in 1907, and Franklin's Tennessee Female College in 1913.

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Tennessee State Library and Archives

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