Perhaps the most famous of UWA’s presidents is the University’s first president, Miss Julia Strudwick Tutwiler. So great was her impact that almost every institution of higher learning in the state has at least one building that bears her name. She stands alone for several reasons. She is the University’s only female president to date, she was a well-known social and educational reformer, she established Alabama’s first kindergarten, she wrote the Alabama state song, and she served The University of West Alabama as president longer than any one else in the school’s history. During her forty-four year term "Miss Julia," as she was affectionately known to her students, saw the turn of the century and changes in education that she could only imagine as a young student at her father’s Greene Springs School in Hale County.

Although born in Tuscaloosa, Julia Tutwiler attended Madame Maroteau’s School in Philadelphia as well as Vasser College. She showed unusual ability in languages and was encouraged by her father, Henry B. Tutwiler, to spend a year in Lexington, Virginia, studying Latin and Greek with professors at Washington and Lee University. She later completed three years of advanced study in Paris and at the Institute of Deaconesses in Kaiserwerth, Germany.

In Germany she became acquainted with vocational training for women prison inmates, teacher-training programs, and industrial and vocational education for women. By most accounts it was while experiencing a bout of homesickness in Germany that she wrote the poem that would later become the lyric to the Alabama State Song.

Tutwiler returned to her beloved Alabama and joined the faculty of the Tuscaloosa Female College where she taught until she became co-principal of Livingston Female Academy in 1879. In 1882 she persuaded the state legislature to appropriate $2500 to the school and made history with the first state appropriations ever made for the education of women in Alabama. As a direct result of her work, the Alabama Normal College, now The University of West Alabama was incorporated on February 22, 1883. In 1888 Julia Tutwiler became the sole principal and later her title was changed to president.

The creation of the Alabama Normal College was only the first step in Miss Julia’s long crusade to see that education was open to women in Alabama. In 1893 she secured state funding for the Alabama Girls Industrial School, now the University of Montevallo, which opened in October 1896. Also in 1896 she

persuaded the University of Alabama to open its admission to include women, and among the first female students were students from the Alabama Normal College in Livingston.

Tutwiler was also active in educational reform at the national level. She was president of the Department of Elementary Education of the National Education Association, and her paper, "The Technical Education of Women" (Education, Boston, November 1882), attracted wide attention and had considerable influence.

Tutwiler’s influence extended beyond educational reform. Equally significant was her effort in prison reform. For many years she was superintendent of prison and jail work for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Her work in the WCTU was instrumental in securing the classification of prisoners and the separation of the sexes, the first juvenile reform school, and the first law for the inspection of jails and prisons. She labored to secure the establishment of night schools and vocational education in prisons and fought the convict-leasing system, although she did not live to see the system end. The Julia Tutwiler Women’s Prison is named for her.

In recognition of her many contributions to The University of West Alabama, the Julia Tutwiler Library is named in her memory and the Tutwiler College of Education is so named in recognition of her influence in education at both the state and national levels.

Julia Strudwick Tutwiler, who began her teaching career as a child teaching slave children to read, and saw The University of West Alabama into the 20th century, has continued to be a presence on the Livingston campus into the 21st century. The Tutwiler Library computerized online resource search system, used by every UWA student, is known as "Miss Julia."