Boylan-Haven-Mather Academy

Boylan-Haven-Mather Academy, more familiarly known as “Mather Academy,” was a private African American boarding school in Camden, South Carolina. Its name reflects four schools founded and merged in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida by the Women's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate former slaves and their descendants. Boylan-Haven-Mather Academy closed in 1983. Among its graduates/students were U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn , major league baseball pioneer Larry Doby, businessman E. Perry Palmer, childcare advocate Frieda Mitchell, "Dean of the CIAA" coach Eddie C. McGirt, and civil rights attorney John Roy Harper II.

Founded in 1886 in Jacksonville, Florida, the school was named for a benefactor, Ann Boylan DeGroot, treasurer of the Newark Conference. She’d hoped to atone for, and change the image of, her family, which had operated two large plantations. In 1901, the school established a nurse training department, which later became Brewster Hospital – the first for African Americans in Jacksonville.

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