History of the Highland Community

History of the Highland Community. . Founder of the Highland Adventist Community, Braden Mulford came to Tennessee in 1004 as a charter student of the Nashville Agricultural and Normal Institute (N.A.N.I)-later more commonly known as Madison College-near Nashville, Tennessee. EA Sutherland and P.T. Magan, with the encouragement of Ellen White, founded this enterprise to train Adventist families to start similar institutions in the then underprivileged South. Mulford attended school at Madison for two years, then acquired this farm in December, 1907. He married Miss Pearl West and his sister and her husband, Lula Mulford West and Forrest West joined him in working together, starting out with Mulford running the school and West the farm. A few years later, they added a sanitarium to the campus, the first medical institution of its kind in Sumner County, and operated a farm-school-sanitarium for 30 years, resigning in 1937. The Kentucky-Tennessee Conference took over the enterprise in 1945 and changed the name to Highland Academy. , Photo caption: The first sanitarium building , The first hospital of its kind in Sumner County; A fire destroyed it on February 2,1928 , In the May 4, 1916, Southern Union Worker W.C. White, son of Ellen White, wrote "Slowly but sadly the workers at Fountain Head have pressed forward with their work. For three or four years they have felt the need of a small rural sanitarium. The neighborhood needed a place where the sick could go for treatments, and the nurses who would care for the occasional cases of the neighborhood needed the more steady work and remuneration that would come from the overworked people of the cities who found health by fleeing for a time to the country., Since our visit in December, 1914, they have moved their schoolhouse to a less beautiful and more sightly location overlooking the public road, (the present Fountain Head Park), and have given to the sick people the most beautiful place on the edge of the forest. Here they have just built a two-story, 12 room cottage, with bathrooms in the basement for the care of the sick. With this "equipment they will be able to care for five or six boarding patients and to do whatever work is needed by the neighbors." , Photo caption: The Fountain Rural School and hospital family in the 1930s, Students and staff pose in front of the rebuilt hospital. Seated in the front row are Mr. and Mrs. Willard F. Ray (fourth and 5th from left). Pearl and Braden Mulford sit seventh and eighth from left. Next to them are Lula and Forrest West. Their daughter and son seated to the right of them-Lila and John Lundquist-lived in the community for many years after the conference took over the enterprise in 1945. , Photo caption: A 1935 fire claimed a rebuilt facility. , Photo caption: A third structure served as a community hospital from the 1940s until 1983. , A new building went up closer to town.