Roanoke College

Roanoke College sits in the quiet town of Salem, Virginia, a few miles west of downtown Roanoke, and it has been here long enough to have sent students to fight in the Civil War. Founded in eighteen forty-two by two Lutheran ministers fresh out of Gettysburg College, the school began as the Virginia Institute, a classical preparatory school about eight miles southwest of Staunton. Five years later it moved to Salem, and in eighteen fifty-three the Virginia Legislature chartered it as Roanoke College.

It is the second-oldest Lutheran college in the United States, a distinction that reflects the dense German and Scots-Irish settlement of this part of the Shenandoah Valley in the colonial era. The founding ministers, David Bittle and Christopher Baughman, wanted an institution that would train young men in both classical learning and religious life for the communities of southwest Virginia.

The Civil War did not close the school. Roanoke was one of the few Southern colleges that stayed open throughout the war. In December of eighteen sixty-three its student body, organized into a Confederate cadet corps, skirmished with Union troops near Salem, lost, and was paroled back to its studies.

The most nationally prominent alumnus is Henry Fowler, class of nineteen twenty-nine, who served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Lyndon Johnson from nineteen sixty-five to nineteen sixty-eight. Fowler oversaw the creation of Special Drawing Rights at the International Monetary Fund, a new international reserve asset still in use today, and guided the country's finances through the early years of the Great Society programs.

The campus today covers about sixty-five acres in Salem, a blend of nineteenth-century brick buildings and modern additions. The college remains Lutheran-affiliated and enrolls about two thousand students. It is a small school with a long memory in a part of Virginia that takes its institutional history seriously.