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Ward-Belmont College

Ward-Belmont was a former "ladies' seminary" located in Nashville, Tennessee on the grounds of the antebellum estate of Adelicia Acklen, Belmont.

The school utilized the grounds of the former Acklen estate and mansion, with a quadrangle of academic and residential buildings being erected over time on the front lawn. It was regarded as a very presitigous "finishing school" by the more aristocratic families of Middle Tennessee, although some students were from considerably farther away.

One of the more famous alumnae was Sarah Ophelia Colley, the woman subsequently known to generations of country music fans as "Minnie Pearl". Another was Elizabeth Farrington, later publisher of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Delegate to Congress from the Territory of Hawaii.

By the early 1950s the heyday of such institutions was largely over. Ward-Belmont's campus was sold to the Tennessee Baptist Convention to be operated as Belmont College (now Belmont University). A new modern non-residential girls' high school, Harpeth Hall School, was erected in the affluent Green Hills section of Nashville to take the place of Ward-Belmont.

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