Lon Morris College (LMC) was a private junior college located in Jacksonville, Texas, United States, and was the only school affiliated with the United Methodist Church that was owned by an individual conference and not the denomination as a whole. Lon Morris was an accredited two-year institute of higher learning, which provided instruction in the arts and sciences with a core curriculum emphasizing liberal arts. While Lon Morris taught as many as 350 students in a semester, enrollment reached more than 1,000, a new record, in the fall of 2009. The school was south of Tyler. The person who last held the title of college president was Dr. Miles McCall; he resigned effective May 24, 2012. Lon Morris College filed for bankruptcy on July 2, 2012. The 112-acre campus was auctioned on January 14, 2013, in Dallas, Texas; the primary purchasers were a local school district and an office supply company. History Founded in 1854 as the New Danville Masonic Female Academy near Kilgore, Lon Morris College was the oldest existing two-year college in Texas until its closure in 2012. In 1873, the academy moved to Kilgore and became property of the Kilgore Methodist Church, changing its name to the Alexander Institute in honor of its president Isaac Alexander, an early Texas educator. The Texas Annual Conference acquired the Alexander Institute in 1875. Chartered on January 15, 1887, the Institute moved to Jacksonville in 1894 and to its final location in 1909. After R.A. "Lon" Morris of Pittsburg, Texas, gave his estate to the school, and with approval of the Texas Annual Conference, the name of the institution was changed again, in 1924, to Lon Morris College. When it closed, Lon Morris was the only two-year Methodist college west of the Mississippi River, and it had held membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools longer than any other two-year college in Texas. It was the only surviving pre-Civil War school in East Texas. One of Lon Morris' presidents was John E. Fellers, a Christian writer and Methodist minister, primarily in the Houston area, but also in Alexandria and Shreveport, Louisiana. In 2009, the campus of Lon Morris grew to the west, with a gift from the city of Jacksonville of a municipal activity center (formerly a Texas National Guard armory), a rodeo arena, and land surrounding both. The college allowed annual events for the Tops-in-Texas Rodeo at the