1876-1887

Isham Lafayette Burrow was born in 1833 in Carroll County, Tenn. After attending Bethel Seminary, a Cumberland Presbyterian school in McLemoresville, Tenn., Burrow received an A.B. degree from Andrew College in Trenton, Tenn., in 1858. He had received his license to preach one year earlier and began his career as minister-educator.

After several years working in Tennessee, Burrow traveled to Lewisburg, Arkansas. He was so taken with the area that he moved his family to Arkansas in 1869 and "transferred in" to the Arkansas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, where he became the pastor of the local church. Also during this period, Burrow pursued his commitment to frontier education. He opened a "seminary" in 1871, and the resulting institution later served as the high school of the Morrilton District of the Arkansas Conference of the Methodist Church.

In 1873, Burrow became the local pastor at Clarksville in the Ozark hills of Johnson County, and the following year the Conference appointed him the principal of the Clarksville District high school, a post which he held in addition to his pastorate. During these years the minister-educator began formulating plans to found a school of his own.

Shaped by frontier individualism, Burrow set out to build a Christian institution of higher learning in western Arkansas virtually by himself. As the site of his new school, Burrow selected a location 25 miles west of Clarksville and five miles east of Ozark in the small community of Altus. In 1875, he acquired 320 acres of land and began to build Central Institute which was the foundation of the modern day Hendrix College. He served as president of the college until 1887 and continued to be involved with the institution as its financial agent until 1889.