O'More College of Design

O’More College of Design is a small private college in Franklin, Tennessee, United States.

It was founded as O'More School of Interior Architecture and Design in 1970, located in the historic district of Franklin. It is a non-traditional, accredited college awarding the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Interior Design, Fashion Design & Merchandising, and Visual Communications which includes Graphic Design, Advertising & Animation. It has an enrollment of about 200, with a male to female ratio of 1 to 9. The job placement rate for graduating students is in the high nineties.^{[citation needed]}

The college is accredited by the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges of Technology (ACCSCT). The Interior Design Department has been CIDA (formerly FIDER) accredited since 1974.

O'More has a cooperative agreement with Middle Tennessee State University which allows its students access to the resources of MTSU's College of Design. Also, O'More College of Design is a sister school to Belmont University located in Nashville, Tennessee. This agreement allows students from both O'More and Belmont to dual-enroll and take classes in efforts to complete a minor or a major simultaneously.

History

The college was founded in 1970 by Eloise Pitts O'More. It is patterned after Le College Feminin in Paris, France, where Pitts studied in the late 1920s, and was aimed at women, who were traditionally not involved in the design fields. O'More began the college with nine students in her home. Since Pitts death in 2002, the college has passed into the hands of Dr. Mark Hilliard. He continues to "fan the flame" of creativity.

The Abbey Leix Mansion (ca. 1866), an Italianate-style home which serves as the College's administration building, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The McAfee Library and Hilliard Institute for Educational Wellness (ca. 1887), a Romanesque Revival-style home now in use as a sensory teaching and learning center and the visual communications department, is one of a handful of remaining examples of the work of H.C. Thompson, arguably Tennessee's most celebrated native architect.^{[citation needed]}

The Abby Leix Mansion is named after the ancestral property in Ireland belonging to the O'More family, and was the first residential structure built in the area after the Civil War in 1867. O'more offers a study abroad program that usually travels to its sister school in Ireland (in honor of the O'Mores.) The mansion's cellar is left over from a previous structure that burned during the war. During the second Battle of Franklin, the Carnton Plantation was used as a hospital while the cellar of the original structure was used as a morgue. The grounds surrounding the mansion were also used for temporary placement of the dead.

External links

• College website
• NCIDQ