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The Perryville Presbyterian Church built a meeting house which was located just a little north east of the old Ewing Female Institute. The members of the Perryville meeting house decided to open an institute of learning, so they decided to build the Perryville Seminary. The Perryville Seminary was opened on October 21, 1850 and was at first an all-boys school. The seminary was incorporated with collegiate powers of the state under the control of the Kentucky Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. The college was located on two acres of land on the Danville Road, east of Perryville. The first principal was Rev. James Vincent. In 1854, the board of trustees of the seminary opened their doors to girls, with classes separated by gender. The grounds were arranged and separated with a solid plank fence that kept the male and female students apart. The students of each department had their own study rooms.
Cost for attending was fifty cents per term, but by 1861, the cost had risen to sixteen dollars per term. They did not allow male and females to board at the same house. The Seminary began with eleven students and by 1857 the enrollment had grown to 220. That same year, 128 men and 92 women graduated. According to the “By laws” of the seminary, students could worship at any church of their choice. Students were “not allowed to keep bad company, much less are they allowed to visit place of vice and immorality. No riding for pleasure. Explanation: If students are permitted to go to a livery stable, or hotel, and hire buggies and horses at pleasure, and spree about as they may like, each one, perhaps, might make a bill of $25 to $50 a year, and at the end of the year, neither the student nor the parent would be the better of the spreeing. One extravagance leads to another-one vice leads to another. Students have enough to do without engaging in sports and pleasures.”i.
In 1861, the Perryville Seminary changed their name to Harmonia College and William B. Godbey, a Methodist minister, became the college’s president. Classes included English and classical courses and students could earn a bachelor of arts and a masters of arts degree. Rev. Godbey wrote that the college was a “booming success.” After the Battle of Perryville, Confederate General Leonidas Polk and his staff returned to town and arrived at Harmonia College. As Polk stood in the doorway, he could hear the famous song “Home Sweet Home” coming from the Union lines out the Springfield Road. When the Federal band stopped playing, a Confederate band picked up the tune and played the refrain of the song. Thinking of home, Polk and his staff fell silent. Within a few days, the college building was taken over by surgeons and used as a Union hospital. Seventy-nine severely wounded soldiers were crammed into five rooms. Rev. Godbey wrote that that when the Civil War broke out, he had only been married for a year and on October 8, 1862, a “terrible battle, the most bloody and magnitudinous in Kentucky during the entire war, was fought at Perryville, and of course, superinduced the utter abandonment of our college, the dispersion of all the people identified with it, and the occupancy of the building as a Union hospital.” During the Civil War, Godbey transferred Harmonia College to Russellville, Indiana and many of the students followed Godbey to the new location. The college remained in Indiana until the end of the war. After the war, his wife had become homesick and wanted to return to Perryville, so Godbey transferred the college back to Perryville.ii. In 1868, the Union government reinterred twenty-two graves from the Seminary hospital to the Perryville National Cemetery. Later the bodies were reinterred to the Camp Nelson National Cemetery.
For eighteen years, Godbey was president of the college and for two of those years he was a circuit rider, but he felt that as a man of God, he had the duty to devote more of his time preaching the Gospel and saving souls, so he resigned as president of the college and the trustees elected Professor Galloway.iii. In September 1886, Professor Galloway purchased the college property from W.L. Caldwell and William Scomp. He planned to repair the building and classes would begin in February. By 1877, there were seventy-one students in attendance at Harmonia College.
In the 1870s, a huge scandal broke out at Harmonia College, when a student named Young, who lived outside of town, drove his landlord’s daughters to school in Perryville and was murdered in the school building at Harmonia. Tom Penny, who was jealous over Young’s relationship with the two girls, went to the school, “raised the window in the room where Young was asleep and struck an axe in his head.” The attack enraged many local residents, who later grabbed Penny, threw a rope around his neck, and lynched him outside of town.
One of the more colorful students that graduated from Harmonia College was the famous temperance league member Carrie Nation. Carrie Nation would take an axe with her and would enter bars and smash liquor bottles. Her followers would wear small axes on their dresses. Many bars would have signs hanging above their establishments stating every nation is welcome except Carrie. With students attending public schools in the area, attendance dwindled as did with other schools in the area and Harmonia College closed their doors in the late 19th Century.
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