Roanoke College

Lutheran pastors David F. Bittle and Christopher C. Baughmann loaded everything a college owned into a single covered wagon in 1847 and moved it from Augusta County to Salem, a railroad town developing into a commercial center in the Roanoke Valley. Six years later the Virginia General Assembly granted a college charter and approved the name Roanoke College—second-oldest Lutheran-affiliated college in the United States, after Gettysburg. The Administration Building went up in 1848, brick by brick made on-site. It survived the Civil War because Union troops converted it into a hospital. The student body had been organized into a corps of cadets; they fought Confederate forces near Salem in December 1863, were quickly outmatched, surrendered, and were paroled back to their studies by the Union commander. The college stayed open through the war—one of the few Southern institutions that did. Roanoke enrolled its first international students in the late 19th century: the first Mexican in 1876, the first Japanese in 1888. In 1898, Surh Beung Kiu became the first Korean to graduate from an American college or university. The institution went coeducational in 1930, opening Smith Hall as its first women's residence in 1941. Seven buildings on the 80-acre Salem campus are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including Miller Hall (1857), Trout Hall (1867), and Bittle Hall (1879). The campus holds the largest Rock Elm in the United States, near the library, and the only Alice Aycock sculpture in Virginia. Olin Hall galleries host rotating exhibitions and are open to visitors. The college produces more Fulbright scholars per capita than most schools twice its size—approximately 2,000 students representing 40 states and 30 countries, one of 280 colleges with a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Robin Yerkes, the most decorated athlete in Roanoke history with 12 All-American honors, won the Division III women's 400m track and field championship in 2009. Mark Samuel won the NCAA Division III Wrestling Championship in March 2025. The walkable campus is a showcase of 19th- and 20th-century college architecture—brick sidewalks, mountain views, and the persistence of a school that moved everything it owned in a wagon and never closed.