Randolph-Macon Academy on the Hill

On a commanding ridge overlooking Front Royal rises the stately brick building of Randolph-Macon Academy, its cupola a landmark visible for miles. The school opened its doors on the sixth of September, eighteen ninety two, founded by Doctor William Waugh Smith as a Methodist preparatory academy tied to Randolph-Macon College. When it was built, its main building cost an estimated seventy five thousand dollars, and a New York newspaper praised it as among the most perfectly equipped schools in the United States.

There is a deeper layer of history in this exact spot. During the Battle of Front Royal in eighteen sixty two, thirty years before the school existed, General Stonewall Jackson is said to have moved his artillery onto this very ridge to command the ground as he assaulted the Federal garrison below. In nineteen seventeen the academy added a military program, and today it is one of only a handful of private military schools in Virginia, a coeducational college preparatory boarding school with its own cadet leadership program.

Its campus of well over one hundred acres sits about seventy miles west of Washington. Generations of cadets have marched on this hill where Jackson's cannon once stood, and the building's tower still watches over the town and the river valley beyond.