In 1873, Baptist minister and former Confederate brigadier general Mark Perrin Lowrey founded the Blue Mountain Female Institute. He, two of his sons, and one of his grandsons served as the first four presidents; he and his daughters, Modena and Margaret, became the first three faculty members; and Modena Lowrey Berry served as the school’s vice-president. The institution passed to the Mississippi Baptist Convention in 1918 and became co-educational in 2005. The campus is advantageously situated on a steeply sloping, partially wooded site. Only the vaguely medieval Lowrey Memorial Baptist Chapel (1908) remains from the school’s early period. James M. Spain designed the impressive Lawrence T. Lowrey Administration Building (1928; pictured) in a neoclassical form, with a five-part facade composition and a central, limestone portico. Jackson architect Dudley C. White, the son of an alumna, designed two buildings, including the Garrett Fine Arts Building (1950), a five-part composition with modernist horizontality and absence of ornament. Five buildings (and the demolished Whitfield Dining Hall of 1928) were designed over a thirty-five-year period by Walter R. Nelson, who was raised on campus by a member of the faculty and eventually established an architectural practice in Memphis. Most notable is his Whitfield Dormitory (1928), a broad five-part brick composition with prominent limestone-quoin corners.