John Gregg Fee (September 9, 1816 – January 11, 1901) was an abolitionist, minister and educator, as well as the founder of the town of Berea, Kentucky. He established The Church of Christ, the Union church in Berea (1853), Berea College (1855), the first in the U.S. South with interracial and coeducational admissions, and late in his life, he founded another congregation that would become the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), two blocks from his first. (1890). During the American Civil War, Fee worked at Camp Nelson to have facilities constructed to support freedmen and their families, and to provide them with education and preaching. The camp was also where the formerly enslaved men who had joined the Union Army were taken to be mustered out in the last years of the Civil War.
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Early life and education
Fee was born in Bracken County, Kentucky, on September 9, 1816, the son of John Fee Jr., of Irish and Scots descent, and Sarah (Gregg) Fee, of Irish and English descent. His father inherited a bondsman who reached the term of his indenture. He then began to buy slaves, finally holding thirteen. Later he recognized more of its problems and invested in lands in free states, but held on to his slaves throughout his life and opposed his son's abolitionism.
Following a conversion to the Christian faith at age 14, John Fee Jr. wanted to join the Methodist Episcopal Church. His father encouraged him to wait, and a couple of years later they both joined the Presbyterian Church. He studied at Augusta College in Bracken County, Kentucky, and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He then entered Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1842, where in studying for the ministry, he made lifelong friendships. The young Fee became a staunch abolitionist, vowing to "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
Career
After his conversion, Fee returned to Kentucky at his father's command: "Bundle up your books and come home. I have spent the last dollar I mean to spend on you in a free state".
In Kentucky, Fee preached against slavery, but found it difficult to find a permanent position, due to widespread pro-slavery sentiment. He started in Lewis County, which had fewer slaveholders, so more people who supported his point of view. In the 1840s, he came into conflict with the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky, which opposed his church's stance to refuse fellowship to slaveholders.
Fee left the Presbyterian Church over this matter and came to believe that Christianity had to be non-denominational and non-sectarian. He began writing about abolition, and some of his work was published by the American Missionary Association (AMA), established in 1846. By 1848 the AMA commissioned Fee as an itinerant preacher in Bracken and Lewis counties. In Lewis County, he and parishioners built a Free Church of Christ.
With a land donation from Cassius M. Clay, a wealthy landowner who supported the church and gradual abolition, in 1853 Fee founded the town of Berea, Kentucky in the interior of the state in Madison County. Like-minded people began to gather there. He preached in neighboring counties, often running into violent opposition to his anti-slavery views. His autobiography is filled with his accounts the volatility of the decade before the war, when he was often challenged and threatened because of his stand on abolition and equal treatment of black people.
In 1855 with other members of Union Church, Fee founded Berea College, the first college in the state that was interracial and coeducational. It began as a one-room schoolhouse, which also served as their local church building. He modeled the school on Oberlin College of Ohio and hired some teachers from there, including the man who became the school's star educator, John Almanza Rowley Rogers. There was great interest in the college, as small as it was, especially since there had not previously been a school in the area.
In the beginning, the students were all white, although from a mix of classes: some came from the upper class, while others were the children of hill folk. A third of them were the children of slave holders. The school grew quickly: it had 15 students in the spring of 1858, 45 for the fall of that year, and over a hundred the following spring.
Marriage and family
Fee married Matilda Hamilton on 26 September 1844. She was also from Bracken County, they had known each other since they were young, and she supported his strong abolitionism. They had several children, some of whom died in childhood.
Legacy
In 2016 Fee was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame, Peterboro, New York.
In honor of its 150th anniversary in 2005, the college gifted a sculpture park to the city. Portrayed are Fee and the school's first teacher Elizabeth Rogers. Fee holds a Bible, and Rogers holds the Declaration of Independence, showing it to an African American boy and girl and a white boy. Located at the site of the college's first building, the pathway includes some of the original brickwork.