in Hattiesburg as South Mississippi College. Another fire destroyed the young institution, forcing it to close. In 1911, W. S. F. Tatum acquired the property and offered it as a gift to the Baptists, and the school reopened as Mississippi Woman's College. In 1953, the Mississippi Baptist Convention voted to make the college coeducational, which necessitated a new name. In 1954, the board of trustees selected the name William Carey College in honor of William Carey, the 18th-century English linguist whose decades of missionary activity in India earned him international recognition as the "Father of Modern Missions."
In 1939, the school, then called the Mississippi Woman's College, took third place in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and it remains the only women's college to ever place in that competition.
In 1968, William Carey announced a merger with the Mather School of Nursing in New Orleans.
In 1976, the college purchased the Gulf Coast Military Academy campus in Gulfport. The beachfront …
