In 1892, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, opened this co-educational, liberal arts college for white students, named for its primary benefactor, Jackson businessman R. W. Millsaps. The campus faced West Street, adjacent to Jackson College (see JM66), which had its main building, Founder’s Hall, facing N. State Street. Millsaps grew quickly, and in 1902 it purchased the property of Jackson College, which moved to West Jackson. The oldest surviving building at Millsaps, James Observatory (1902), was the second observatory in the state when it was completed. The Beaux-Arts classical red brick and stone-trimmed Murrah Hall (1914, Harry N. Austin) on West Street rises two stories from a raised base and is dominated by a central Corinthian portico with a full entablature and an attic. Austin moved from Georgia to Jackson in 1905, married Millsaps’s niece, Mary Buie, and by 1906 had become the de facto campus architect. In 1925, Austin shifted the campus’s orientation toward N. State, and Science Hall (1929), now named Sullivan-Harrell, his last building here before his death in 1934, connects the east and west sides of campus.
The next campus architect, R. W. Naef, designed Whitworth Hall (1939), which established Naef’s Colonial Revival brand of classicism. Whitworth’s gabled Tuscan portico responded to Founder’s Hall (demolished 1971 and replaced by the carillon tower) to form a semicircular drive facing N. State. Naef completed this semicircle with Sanders Hall in 1951 and then used Franklin Hall (1958), a women’s dormitory, to turn the corner northward.
In 1957, Jones and Haas added the two-story student union to a sunken lawn at the center of campus. It combines an exposed concrete frame with red brick and a deep double-tiered gallery in an abstract nod to Southern Colonial vernacular. The Brutalist Gertrude C. Ford Academic complex (1970–1971, Biggs, Weir and Chastain), a concrete and brick design by Tom Biggs, is a dominating presence connecting Murrah Hall and the library. The symmetrical facade, articulated by a grid of concrete piers and fins supporting a projecting cornice, opens onto a multilevel plaza shaded by live oak trees. A north-facing clerestory lights the attic-level art studios. Inside, a two-story foyer with unpainted brick walls allows circulation to lecture halls, auditorium, art galleries, library, and a ground-level parking garage.