University of the Cumberlands

Lindsley merged the Western Military Institute and the University of Nashville. It moved its entire operation from Georgetown, Kentucky, where it had operated since its founding in 1847, to Nashville. Bushrod Johnson was a professor at the Western Military Institute from 1851 to 1855. He served as its headmaster when it moved to Nashville in the merger and continued in that capacity until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. He served the Confederate States Army during the war as a general. It was during this period that Sam Davis attended the Western Military Institute; he was later called the "boy hero of the Confederacy", and hanged by Union forces as a spy in 1863. The Western Military Institute did not offer instruction from 1862 to 1865. In 1862, the campus building served as a Union hospital for Federal officers.
Industrialist Montgomery Bell left the University of Nashville $20,000 in his will in 1867, and Lindsley used the proceeds to open up the Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA) that year as …