Mars Hill College Historic District

Mars Hill College in Madison County, North Carolina, grew from the French Broad Baptist Institute, which opened in 1856 on a four-acre lot donated by Edward Carter. The campus took its lasting form under President Robert Lee Moore, who led the college from 1897 to 1938 and pushed it toward junior college accreditation in 1926. Moore hired several architects, and from the early 1930s Henry Irven Gaines served as college architect until 1970. Gaines designed six contributing buildings between 1935 and 1955, including three-story Georgian dormitories and the Moderne Wall Science Building completed in 1940. Earlier work includes the rustic stone Montague Building of 1919 and McConnell Gymnasium of 1924. The oldest surviving building is Founders Hall, a late nineteenth-century brick classroom building. The district is important for its record of Baptist-supported higher education and for its architecture across more than half a century.