Scarritt College for Christian Workers was a college associated with the United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The campus is now home to Scarritt Bennett Center. History of Scarritt College (1892–1988) The Scarritt College for Christian Workers started as the Scarritt Bible and Training School in Kansas City, Missouri in 1892. Belle Harris Bennett, a Southern Methodist woman missionary leader from Richmond, Kentucky, presented the idea to create a training school for missionaries in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She imagined it to be similar to what Lucy Rider Meyer had created at the Chicago Training School for Home and Foreign Missions. The idea was agreed upon at the Southern Methodist Woman's Board of Foreign Missions annual conference in 1889. Board member Mrs. Nathan Scarritt of Kansas City, Missouri (the child of missionaries in India) was the first to offer a pledge for the new training school. Her husband, Reverend Nathan Spencer Scarritt later offered a $25,000 challenge and land in Missouri to begin the school. Within one year, Bennett had secured the matching pledges from throughout the Church and other Mission Boards. Despite some dispute within the Woman's Board, the Southern Methodist General Conference approved the plan, and work began in earnest in April 1891. The first building's cornerstone was laid in Kansas City on July 2, 1891. In 1891 the Board of Managers of the Scarritt Bible and Training School elected Miss Laura Askew Haygood to be recalled from her missionary work in China to be the principal. But Haygood was not able to leave China so Miss Maria Layng Gibson, principal of a private high grade school in Covington, Kentucky was elected instead in 1892. The first building was dedicated on September 14, 1892, and school officially opened with three students. As that first year progressed, school enrollment increased to thirty-four, fourteen of whom were boarders. Miss Layona Glenn was the first graduate in the spring and she was sent to Brazil to serve as a missionary. Curriculum included church history, history of missions, religious pedagogy, methods of work, phonetics, hymnology, and bookkeeping. A small hospital was started up for the training of nurses but was discontinued in 1905 due to difficulty in financing it. In 1895 Bennett turned over $52,394.58 collected so far by her fundraising speeches and $20,000 given by the Conference Societies for the Belle Bennett Chair (to maintain the Bible Department). The