Methodist Whitworth College struggled to stay afloat over its entire one-hundred-year operation. It opened in 1859 as Brookhaven College for Young Ladies, founded by the town’s developer, Milton J. Whitworth, who quickly renamed it Whitworth College for Young Ladies and hired architect A. E. Moreton to lay out the campus. Harvey F. Johnson became president in 1867 and served until 1886; Johnson Institute (1883–1884), named for him, is the oldest extant building. The two-story brick building, which resembles am industrial structure as much as a school, has been little changed. After several short-lived administrations, Inman M. Cooper took over in 1902 and stayed for twenty-three years. He built the Colonial Revival wooden Elizabeth Cottage (1913) as his home at his own expense and named it for his wife. Cooper replaced Moreton’s frame structures with stylish brick buildings: the classical Mary Jane Lampton Auditorium (1913; pictured above); the Mission-styled Cooper Hall (1914, Nolan and Torre) and Enoch Hall (1920); and the Craftsman YWCA Hut (1920). These four at the historic core of the campus mark the apogee of the college, which became fully accredited in 1925, with a peak enrollment of over three hundred women. The school gradually declined, losing accreditation and becoming, serially, a Methodist junior college, a coed school for World War II veterans, a night school, and a Bible college, until in 1999 the state legislature established the Mississippi School of the Arts on the premises. All the campus buildings were rehabilitated in the early twenty-first century by Albert and Associates, who also designed the eight-story dormitory.