The first YMCA Students’ Conference in the South was held at UT in 1893. Conferences were then held annually—first at UT, then in points near Asheville, North Carolina, then at Montreat, North Carolina, and then, in 1906, at Black Mountain, North Carolina, in what would become the Blue Ridge Assembly. In 1911 ground was broken for Robert E. Lee Hall, and the conferences of the YMCA, YWCA, Missionary Education Movement, and others were held at the Blue Ridge Assembly beginning in 1912. The annual June conference at Blue Ridge was a major part of the student experience in the early part of the twentieth century.