McKenzie Drive as memory place
A campus street named for one of the root colleges with ties to Methodism, the Confederacy, and slavery.
This short street on the west side of campus, sometimes called “Fraternity Row,” is home to the four fraternity houses and is perpendicular to both Wesleyan Drive and Maple Street. McKenzie Drive was given its name in remembrance of McKenzie College, one of Southwestern’s four root colleges.
The man who established McKenzie College in 1841 was John W. P. McKenzie. I sourced most of the information about him and McKenzie College from chapter 4 of To Survive and Excel: The Story of Southwestern University, 1840-2000. This chapter turned out to be a thorough documentation of his life and ties with Southwestern University, slavery, the Confederacy, and Methodism. The fact that all of this has been known at least since 2006, when Jones published his book, and we still have a street named after McKenzie with no contextualization of what remembering him and the College here means to our present and future, makes what I am about to tell you that much more important to reiterate here.
According to To Survive and Excel: The Story of Southwestern University, 1840-2000, John McKenzie was not only a devout Methodist but also one of the largest slave owners in his northeastern Texas county at the time. He was also an avid supporter of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Though an undeniably important figure in the earliest history of Southwestern University, I believe it is important that this information be remembered and known by more people in the community.
After McKenzie graduated from university in North Carolina, he became a teacher and occasionally served as a preacher. In 1836 he decided to become a full time traveling minister. His first assignment was to Choctaw Native American territory in Oklahoma, where he preached for three years as part of the larger colonial project of Anglos “civilizing” Indians that had been displaced from their land in the Southeastern U.S. and forcefully relocated to Oklahoma Territory from the 1830s to the 1850s in the “Trail of Tears.”
John McKenzie was sent to other parts of the country to preach as well, but because of his declining health, he settled on a large area of land in Red River County Texas in 1841. He named his residence the “Itinerant Retreat”
His residence in Clarksville, Texas, would become the location of McKenzie College. Very shortly after arriving there, McKenzie opened a college which operated out of his home. The first class, beginning in 1841, had 16 students in total, but it wasn’t until 1854 that the school earned its charter. Over the years the college expanded considerably. To accommodate the growing student body, McKenzie constructed new residence halls and academic buildings. The college earned an excellent reputation as an institution of higher learning, especially compared to the few other colleges in the South at this time. The college even admitted women, which was unusual for the time, though they were all white.
What made McKenzie College different from Southwestern’s other root institutions is that it never struggled financially, that is, until the Civil War broke out. This is because McKenzie College was inseparable from McKenzie Plantation. The college was able to stay afloat where others may have struggled because McKenzie College benefited greatly from the “free” labor of enslaved people. The slaves built the buildings within which the college operated, and the slaves worked the land, growing the crops and raising the livestock that kept the students of McKenzie College fed.
Over the years, John McKenzie continued to purchase more land, which meant he needed more slaves to work it. In 1843, tax documents show that he owned 2 slaves. This number would continue to grow, reaching 36 by 1861.
In his autobiography, a former student of McKenzie’s named M. B. Lockett, eventual Southwestern Board of Trustees member and namesake of the Lockett Building, home currently to Goodfolks Restauarant on the Square, and someone who did two tours of duty in the Confederate Army, claimed with pride that Dr. McKenzie was a determined pro-slavery man and secessionist. During the Civil War, many of McKenzie’s preachings involved praying to God for the defeat of the enemies of the Confederacy.
It was not just John McKenzie himself who identified with the Confederacy. Many students of McKenzie college were a part of the war effort to defeat the North–not only Lockett, who was an enlisted man like many of the other McKenzie students who enlisted, but high ranking generals such as General William Hugh Young, who is a prominent figure in Civil War History.
The end of the Civil War and the freedom of slaves emphasized how much the college relied on the free labor of enslaved people to succeed. After slavery became illegal and McKenzie was forced to free his slaves, his land lost almost all potential financial value it once had. McKenzie closed his college in 1868 due to very low enrollment and, ultimately, insolvency.
A few years after the closing of McKenzie College, John McKenzie would become a part of F. A. Mood’s effort to create a central Methodist university in Texas. This vision would become Southwestern University. He joined the Board of Curators and was elected the Vice Regent of Southwestern University to Mood’s Regent. He held this title from 1877 until 1881 upon his death at the age of 76. McKenzie always considered Southwestern University the successor of his own college.
While I believe that McKenzie deserves recognition for his success in providing students with an excellent education and being part of Southwestern University’s beginning, I believe that a lot of his success is attributed to the labor of enslaved people as well as his position as an Anglo in relation to the larger colonization of Texas. It is impossible to say whether McKenzie College would or would not have excelled as it did without the reliance on free labor. However, it seems to have been a huge factor in its success. John McKenzie should be remembered for his accomplishments while also being remembered for the problematic methods he used in becoming successful.
Southwestern University having a street with McKenzie’s namesake directly ties it to its involvement in the Confederacy and slavery as well as the colonialist history of Texas. It is easy for Southwestern to celebrate only the positive associations of John McKenzie and his institution while not acknowledging this dark past.
The most apparent example of this celebration, in my opinion, is how Southwestern is able to label itself as the first university in Texas. This claim, in constant battle with Baylor’s similar claim to have been the first continuous college established in Texas, in 1845, appears to be central to Southwestern’s identity. If Rutersville hadn’t been the earliest established at 1840, we might be drawing our claim from McKenzie’s establishment one year later, in 1841. And if we were claiming that our main founding root college was McKenzie College, we would have had an even larger burden to negotiate when we made that claim.
