Education of Marion County, Tennessee

Pryor Institute

The Sequatchie Valley's largest school, predecessor to Marion County High School

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Last updated: May 26, 2026

Pryor Institute was a co-educational private school in Jasper that operated from around 1889 to 1910. For two decades it was the largest school in the Sequatchie Valley, drawing students from across Tennessee and neighboring states. When the building was sold to Marion County in 1910, it became the first home of Marion County High School, marking the transition from private-academy education to public secondary schooling in the county seat.

Founding

Per his Find a Grave memorial, the institute's namesake Jackson "General" Pryor was born January 15, 1816, and died November 16, 1900, at age 84; he is buried at Little White Church Cemetery in Jasper. He founded the institute around 1889 with his brother Washington Pryor and Col. A. L. Spears. The school was named in honor of Jackson Pryor, whom local accounts referred to as "General Pryor" although, per his Goodspeed biography, he took no part in the Civil War and the honorific was bestowed by his fellow citizens.

Per the Goodspeed biography, Jackson Pryor was born in Morgan County, Tennessee, a son of Green H. and Biddy (Halloway) Pryor, and was educated in the public schools of Marion County. He began selling goods in Jasper in 1838, formed a partnership with W. S. Griffith a few years later, and ran an extensive mercantile business alone until 1857 before returning to his farm just north of the city. He married Beersheba L. Perkins on June 28, 1841; Beersheba was the daughter of Isam Perkins, who had sent her to the Sam Houston Academy in Jasper for her education, where she met Jackson. The founding of the Pryor Institute therefore represented a second generation of Jasper families investing in local schooling. Papers of Jackson Pryor spanning 1830 to 1897 are held at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Some sources date the founding to 1887 rather than 1889; the Marion County High School website and the TNGenWeb Pryor biography both reference the school without specifying the exact chartering year.

The school

Pryor Institute was a primary and high school for boys and girls, unusual for its era in being explicitly co-educational from the start. It drew students from multiple states, making it the most prominent educational institution in the Sequatchie Valley during the late 19th century. A surviving brochure from 1900, catalogued in the OCLC ArchiveGrid, documents the school's offerings during its mature period.

The co-educational model distinguished Pryor from many Tennessee academies of the period, which typically operated single-sex or admitted women only to a separate "female department." The Jasper History Museum holds Pryor Institute and Marion County High School annuals dating from 1897, documenting the student body and faculty across the institute's final years and the transition to public education. The annuals include class photographs, commencement programs, and rosters of the school's literary societies, musical organizations, and early athletic clubs, all of which continued seamlessly when the building transitioned to MCHS in 1910.

College Street

The Jasper street where the institute stood is still called College Street today. The name persists because of the school's prominence in the community. Along with Academy Street (named for Sam Houston Academy), College Street preserves the memory of Jasper's 19th-century educational landscape in the town's geography. The pairing of a College Street and an Academy Street within a few blocks of each other is a small but vivid civic-geography fossil of the antebellum and Gilded Age Tennessee pattern in which a county seat typically supported one state-chartered academy and one later private institute, both within walking distance of the courthouse square.

Notable student

Tom Stewart, who would go on to serve as chief prosecutor in the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial and as U.S. Senator from Tennessee (1939 to 1949), attended Pryor Institute. Stewart later practiced law in Jasper from 1915 to 1919 before becoming district attorney for the 18th Judicial Circuit. Stewart's later Senate career included committee assignments on Post Offices and Judiciary, and he is the single most prominent direct alumnus of Pryor Institute to achieve national office. His attendance at the institute in the 1890s coincided with the school's peak enrollment years and places him among the last cohort of students to graduate before the transition to public secondary education.

Transition to Marion County High School (1910)

In 1910, the Pryor Institute building was sold to Marion County. The county opened Marion County High School on the site, establishing public secondary education in Jasper for the first time. That transition ended the private-academy model that had served the valley since the founding of Sam Houston Academy in 1826.

Jackson Pryor had died a decade earlier, on November 16, 1900. The sale of the building came just ten years after his death, as the broader shift from private academies to county-run public schools reshaped education across Tennessee.

In the late 1950s, Marion County built a newer Marion County High School facility on the front lawn of the original Pryor Institute building, after which the original Pryor building was demolished. The late-1950s building then served as MCHS until the county built its current Ridley Drive campus, after which the College Street building became Jasper Middle School.

Jasper Middle moved to a new Highway 150 campus in October 2024, and the College Street building now houses Marion County Schools annex and central-office functions. The original Pryor Institute structure is gone, but the College Street site has been in continuous educational use from 1910 to the present, across three successive buildings.

Related

About Marion County High School (successor) →
About Sam Houston Academy (earlier academy) →
About the town of Jasper →

Sources