Missouri felt like Eden—at first. His boils subsided, there were no mosquitoes, and his general health improved. By the end of March, however, he understood why this job had fallen into his lap. While Neosho was a boom town, flush with money from the nearby silver mines, Neosho College was deep in debt and about to declare bankruptcy. No amount of “begging” Alex did could raise enough money to bail it out. He told his parents that he saw “no hope,” and that the campus would probably be converted into a hotel or factory.
Friends advised Alex to quit at once and take up work in the ministry, but he vowed to stick it out until the end of the year, “so that no one could say that I had caused the failure by giving up too soon.” By now he was engaged to Elizabeth Harwood, a Brooklyn-born woman who had spent her youth on a farm near the Millars’ in Brookfield. Alex gave Lizzie a ruby ring bought with money he had won in a college essay contest.
Breaking with his family’s Presbyterian tradition, Alex was ordained as a Methodist minister. He thought about taking a job as a preacher, but one thing stood in his way: whenever he tried to write sermons, his mind went blank. The boy who had given up on his dream of public lecturing discovered that he was not a preacher, either. Whatever Alex Millar himself might want, the fates seemed determined to make him a college president.
In the summer of 1887, Alex got a letter from Rev. James A. Anderson, who had met him at a Methodist conference the year before when he was trying to drum up funds for Neosho College. Anderson was secretary of the Board of Trustees for Central Collegiate Institute, a small Methodist college in Altus, Ark., where the founder and first president, Isham Burrow, had just resigned. Would Alex come to Altus and take over the presidency? Yes! Yes! Alex and Lizzie got married in June, 1887.
Alex arrives in Altus