Historic Schools – From Union University to Central Magnet School

The Central Magnet School campus has a long history of educational excellence. Union University was built on this site in 1849. The school accommodated 300 students and operated until 1861, when classes were suspended during the Civil War. Used as a hospital and soldiers’ quarters, the building was badly damaged. Reopening after the war, it operated in Murfreesboro from 1868 to 1873 before moving permanently to Jackson, Tennessee.

Tennessee College for Women was also located here, built in 1907 by the Southern Baptist Convention. Housed in a Neoclassical-style domed building, it was Tennessee’s only senior college for women at that time. It later became a standard college offering bachelor’s degrees. In 1946, the college merged with Lebanon’s Cumberland University and later became part of Ward-Belmont School for Women in Nashville (now Belmont University).

The current 1950 building opened as Central High School. Murfreesboro began desegregating schools in 1962, eight years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Paul Marchbanks, Jr., son of a local minister, was the first African American student to attend CHS, graduating in 1966. The high school was converted into Central Middle School in 1973 and became a magnet school in 2010.