Virginia Military Institute

The Virginia Military Institute, founded in eighteen thirty-nine, was the first state-supported military college in the United States. It opened on the site of the old Lexington state arsenal, with its first superintendent a West Point graduate named Francis Smith.

It grew into the oldest public senior military college in the country. During the Civil War, the school sent roughly eighteen hundred graduates into Confederate service. In May of eighteen sixty-four, VMI cadets, many of them teenagers, marched to the Battle of New Market and helped turn the tide of a Confederate victory there. The Union Army burned VMI's buildings in retaliation a month later.

The post was rebuilt after the war and has remained in continuous operation. Stonewall Jackson taught here as a professor for a decade before the war, and his house a few blocks away is still a museum.