Annie Peyton (née Annie Coleman), born in 1852, was a native of Madison County in Mississippi. She was well educated and graduated from Whitworth College in 1871. At the age of twenty-three in 1875, Peyton married the Honorable Ephraim G. Peyton, Junior. The two had seven children, though one daughter, Lillian, died early in the 1880s. Peyton witnessed much of the atrocities of the Civil War and the lasting effects it had for the finances of Southern families for many years. As a result of this, the young Peyton was forced to face the reality of poverty for uneducated families, especially ones that relied on the mother to manage the home while the father was away (like that of the military families in the Confederacy).1 This gruesome knowledge of war and poverty would later inspire Peyton to found the Industrial Institute and College, now called the Mississippi University for Women.
Starting in the 1870s, while working as a teacher at Whitworth College, Annie Peyton became disgusted and aggravated with Mississippi’s exceeding accommodation toward the education of boys and men, though the poor and middle class girls and women were left with “no prospect of a higher education.”2 This imbalance of rights motivated the young judge's wife into action, as she believed education was what prompted progress and the advancement of families as a well-educated home raised intelligent children for future generations. As a result, Peyton began asserting that a state-funded college for women was necessary to the good of Mississippi and made it her goal to see it into fruition.
Peyton did not work alone, though, nor did she start the movement toward a state-funded female college education. Instead, she reformed previous ideas and worked in correlation with the increased interest in education. Peyton's adaptation of ideas originated in the works of Sallie Eola Reneau from the 1850s-1870s. Reneau had long advocated for a state funded female college but to no avail, and by the 1870s, had all but given up on the idea due to two failed pieces of legislation and a repealed amendment for her Reneau Female University of Mississippi in Oxford.3 Peyton, seeing this, built upon the wave of positivism for this cause and helped amass more support. This project is the accumulation of primary and secondary resources relating to Peyton's journey in founding the university and maintaining it after its opening.
1 "A Mississippi Woman" Annie Coleman Peyton, 1852-1898 by Mary Lou Peyton, Fant Memorial Library Archives.
2 “A Tribute to Annie Coleman Peyton” by S.C. Caldwell, no date. 38th folder, lot 441, The Peyton Collection, Mississippi University for Women Archives.
3 David Sansing, Making Haste Slowly: The Troubled History of Higher Education in Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 68.