In 1873, a cholera epidemic swept through Middle Tennessee and killed enough adults to leave hundreds of children with no one. Judge John C. Ferris saw what happened to them — the ones who ended up on the streets, in the courts, in nowhere — and decided it wasn’t acceptable.
It took him twelve years.
For over a decade, Ferris criss-crossed the state building support for a home for orphaned children. He lobbied, he fundraised, he argued. Eventually he found his benefactors: Edmund W. “King” Cole, a railroad tycoon, and his wife Anna Russell Cole.
The Coles had recently lost their son Randall in a railroad accident. They donated 92 acres of land off Murfreesboro Road and put the money that would have been Randall’s inheritance into the project. On February 20, 1885, the Randall Cole Industrial School opened its doors.
Nine years later, in 1894, a larger building was erected and named the Anna Russell Cole Auditorium. It still stands on Foster Avenue. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1887, the State of Tennessee took over operations and renamed it the Tennessee Industrial School. The name told you what it was: an institution where orphaned, abandoned, and court-referred children would learn trades — industrial training so they could support themselves as adults. The mission was “homes for the homeless.”
That same year, a “Colored Department” was established, run by Thomas A. Sykes, a prominent Black leader in Nashville. The school was segregated from the start, like everything else in 1887 Tennessee.
Over the following decades, the school became something more complicated than an orphanage. Courts sent children there — the “incorrigible,” the runaways, the ones the system didn’t know what to do with. Some were true orphans. Some were kids whose parents were alive but unable or unwilling to raise them. The school took them all.
In 1955, the institution was renamed the Tennessee Preparatory School. The word “Industrial” was dropped. The emphasis shifted, at least officially, toward academics. The students called it TPS.
By the late twentieth century, the population was dwindling. The state had shifted toward foster care and community-based services. Fewer courts sent children to residential schools. The campus on Murfreesboro Road — the dormitories, the hospital, the auditorium, the grounds — felt increasingly empty.
But there was football.
In 1970, the TPS Bronco Busters won the Class A State Championship, shutting out Sweetwater 34–0. The team had a 30-man roster. They were orphans, wards of the state, court-referred kids — Black and white together, eating together, living together, playing together. Their coach, Bobby Newby, had promised after losing the title game the previous year that he’d move up to a tougher schedule and come back and win.
Larry Saunders, a tackle on that team, later served in the Army’s 101st Airborne and became a Nashville Metro Schools principal. He said: “It showed that regardless of where life has taken you, the outcome, you can change it. A lot of us didn’t really want to be there. We wanted to have parents, some of us didn’t have parents. Then once you grow up with these guys, we realized that we did have a future and we could do whatever we set our minds to do with proper guidance.”
By 2002, there were barely ten students left. The state closed TPS in December of that year. One hundred and seventeen years after Judge Ferris opened the doors for Nashville’s cholera orphans, the last children walked out.
The campus is still there, off Murfreesboro Road. The state uses parts of it — the Department of Correction, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Around 2012, Metro Schools opened the Nashville School of the Arts on a portion of the grounds. The Anna Russell Cole Auditorium still stands.
The 1970 state championship jacket is in a museum on the old campus. Bobby Newby died of cancer in 2017 at 82. King Cole’s railroad money built the place. His dead son’s name christened it. A judge’s twelve-year obsession with orphaned children made it happen.
And a cholera epidemic in 1873 started it all — a disease that killed the parents and left the children standing, with nowhere to go, until Nashville built them somewhere.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons