VMI Barracks: The Gothic Castle on the Parade Ground

The barracks of the Virginia Military Institute look like a medieval castle transplanted to the Shenandoah Valley, and that was entirely intentional. In eighteen forty-eight, VMI Superintendent Francis Smith brought in Alexander Jackson Davis, the preeminent American architect of the era, to design a new cadet dormitory. Davis produced a castellated Gothic Revival quadrangle.

Davis went on to design more Gothic buildings for VMI, creating one of the earliest Gothic Revival campus complexes in the country and a model that military schools across America would imitate. Before the Civil War, Professor Thomas Jackson taught at VMI, years before the war made him Stonewall. The barracks complex was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-five.