Sandy Valley Seminary and John C.C. Mayo College

Sandy Valley Seminary and John C.C. Mayo College

Sandy Valley Seminary was founded in 1905 and was operated by a local board of community, business and religious leaders. Both John C. C. Mayo and his wife, Alice, were instrumental in its founding and very supportive of its educational efforts, donating the land on which the schools first buildings were built. Dr. I. R. Turner was its first president.

Sandy Valley Seminary was what today would be called a prep school, a private high school. Its 1907 catalog listed a grueling curriculum.

Elementary algebra, first yeat Latin, botany, rhetoric and composition, advanced English and general history. By the third year, students were studying Virgil, geometry, Greek and medieval and modern history, among other subjects. Class began at 8:00 each morning and continued until 4:00 in the afternoon. Tuition was a paltry $29.00 per term, or $26.00 per term if all three terms were paid in advance.

Students came from all over Johnson County as word spread of the quality education available from the teachers at Sandy Valley Seminary.

In 1918 the grounds and buildings of Sandy Valley Seminary were acquired by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and its name changed to John C. C. Mayo College.

Under this new regime the school was directed by President H. G. Sowards who continued the same advanced curriculum and strict discipline of his predecessors. Trustees of the school included H. B. Rice and John E. Buckingham. However, after years of financial struggle to maintain the high level of education at the school the Methodist Church Conference reluctantly closed the school in 1928.

There ensued a bitter legal battle between the church Conference and Alice Mayo (by then Alice Mayo Fetter), based upon a reversionary clause in the deed from Mrs. Fetter to the church.

Mrs. Fetter eventually won this protracted court case and received undisputed title to the school property in 1936, thus ending the brief, but enduring, educational legacy of Sandy Valley Seminary and John C. C. Mayo College.