About the Archives at Millsaps College

The College and Methodist Archives are two distinct but interrelated special collections of the library. The Millsaps College Archives preserves the records of the college since 1892; the J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism brings together manuscript and printed materials that tell the history of the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church and its antecedents since 1799.

Millsaps College Archives

Millsaps College, opened in 1892, was established by the former Mississippi and North Mississippi Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the education of young men. It became co-educational in 1899 and continues as a liberal arts college under the auspices of the United Methodist Church.

The Millsaps College Archives preserves the administrative records of the College and collects faculty, student and college publications and private papers. Most of the records of the early period of the College were destroyed in a fire which leveled the main building in 1914. The Archives contains few records prior to that time. In 1982 the library staff began collecting the college records which had been stored in the attic of Murrah Hall until its renovation and combining them with material already in the library. Organization of these records is still in progress. The College Archives holds a small collection of papers from Grenada and Whitworth Colleges, Methodist institutions which closed and transferred their students to Millsaps in 1938. The J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism, which shares space with the Millsaps Archives, complements this collection since the two institutions share much history.

J.B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism

The Cain Archives is the repository for historical records of the Mississippi Conference, United Methodist Church, and its antecedent groups. The conference was established in 1813 as the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, following Tobias Gibson’s appointment from South Carolina to the Natchez Territory in 1799.