Peace College: A Confederate Hospital That Became a Women's College

The building you are passing at the corner of Peace Street in downtown Raleigh has lived several lives in quick succession, and each one says something different about the South in the nineteenth century.

The Presbyterian Synod of North Carolina chartered Peace Institute in eighteen fifty-seven, named for William Peace, an elder at Raleigh's First Presbyterian Church who donated ten thousand dollars and a parcel of land. Construction of the main building began two years later to a design by Thomas Holt, a substantial brick structure meant to educate young women in the classical tradition. Then the war intervened.

In June eighteen sixty-two, before the building could open for classes, the Confederate Army converted it into a hospital. Wounded soldiers from the Virginia campaigns filled the rooms intended for students. After Appomattox, the building served the Freedman's Bureau for two years, a sharp pivot in purpose, the same walls now housing the federal agency charged with aiding formerly enslaved people in the early chaos of Reconstruction.

Only in eighteen seventy-two did Peace Institute finally open as a school. And almost immediately it began doing remarkable things. By eighteen seventy-five it had established what scholars believe was the South's first school of art and painting. By eighteen eighty, it was operating the South's first kindergarten and one of the first schools of home economics in the region.

For more than a century, Peace functioned as a women's college, offering liberal arts education to generations of North Carolina women. The college became William Peace University in two thousand eleven and transitioned to coeducational status the following year, though the original name still echoes across campus.

The main building, a Civil War hospital, a Reconstruction office, a women's college, still stands on Peace Street, a quiet repository of the South's complicated nineteenth century in brick and mortar.