Patrick Henry was a busy man in 1775.
On March 23, he gave a notable speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond. Later that spring, after the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, seized the Colony’s gunpowder, Henry led a group of angry militiamen who almost brought the Colony to open revolt. He served in the Second Continental Congress, was appointed colonel of the 1st Virginia Regiment, and organized the Virginia State Navy.
Why, then, did he consider a fledgling academy in the backwoods of Prince Edward County sufficiently important to take time away from overthrowing the British?
The founding of Hampden-Sydney College during a revolution was partly a coincidence, but the founders were also anti-royalist — so much so that they named the school after two Englishmen who lost their lives as enemies of the crown.
Hampden-Sydney was formed under the auspices of the Hanover Presbytery. Organized in 1755 near Mechanicsville, the Hanover Presbytery was the Presbyterian Church’s governing body for Virginia and North Carolina. In Colonial Virginia, Presbyterians — mainly Scotch-Irish — were “dissenters” from the Anglican church, said Charles Pearson, an archaeologist and adjunct professor at Hampden-Sydney. Strong believers in education, “they wanted to found a school in Virginia, in part — they didn’t say it, but as a reaction to the royal school, William and Mary. They wanted a school of their own that was not part of the royal establishment.”
Talk of a new academy south of the James River began in the early 1770s. As conflict with the mother country deepened, education, like everything else, became increasingly politicized. The choice of the name Hampden-Sydney reflected a Presbyterian commitment to representative government and religious freedom. John Hampden was one of the first Englishmen to object to taxes without representation. A Puritan, he fought the monarchy in the English Civil War and died from injuries sustained at the Battle of Chalgrove Field (1643). Algernon Sydney, an influential political theorist who opposed the divine right of kings, was arrested in 1683 for allegedly conspiring to assassinate King Charles II. The plot failed and Sydney was beheaded.
Prince Edward was chosen for the new academy partly because a local landowner offered 100 acres for the campus. In February 1775, members of the presbytery approved construction and elected Samuel Stanhope Smith as rector, or chief administrative officer.
Smith placed an advertisement in Dixon and Hunter’s Virginia Gazette on Oct. 7, 1775. The academy’s goal: to “form good men, and good Citizens, on the common and universal Principles of Morality…” Parents had “full Liberty to require their Children to attend on any Mode of Worship which either Custom or Conscience has rendered most agreeable to them.” Classes were to commence on Nov. 10.
In the advertisement, Smith made a point of stressing Anglican involvement in the academy’s governance. “The presbytery was undertaking this project in a royal colony in which the official religion was the Church of England,” said Caroline Emmons, Elliott Professor of History and director of the college’s Center for Public History. “As Herbert Bradshaw, who wrote a book on the college’s history, put it, ‘the establishment of an educational institution by Dissenters was both controversial and suspect.’ So, the inclusion of Anglicans on the initial Board was both politically prudent and also reflected the complex religious landscape of the time period. I think the decision also reflected the college’s commitment to toleration of other denominations.”
The rector’s house, the Academy House, and the house of the steward, who was responsible for housing and feeding the students, were built along what is now College Road. The Academy House, the main classroom building, was a three-story brick structure.
In the 1830s the deteriorating Academy House was demolished. “By the 1840s the area that came to be called Old College was abandoned and the buildings disappeared,” Pearson said. “Now for some period of time, people knew where they were. But by the early 1900s, over the course of 100 years, the locations of all the buildings were forgotten. No maps exist of the 18th century college.”
In 2017, the director of the college’s Atkinson Museum asked Pearson if he could locate the 18th-century buildings. “They were thinking of me coming out here and digging holes in the ground, etc., and I said, ‘That’s time consuming — archaeologists today use a whole series of remote sensing instruments that are efficient, reliable and non-destructive.'” A ground-penetrating radar machine, which looks like a lawnmower with a viewscreen, detected the foundation of the Academy House, lost for more than a century.
In spring 2025, students in HIST385 began excavating under the direction of Pearson. “Perhaps most interesting is that we conclusively showed that the building faced north-south, not the road,” said history major Watson Grabar, now a senior. “For years it was supposed that the old college buildings faced the road, but they did not.”
The last people to handle the foundation’s bricks, before the team uncovered them, were probably enslaved.
“We know that enslaved people were here,” Emmons said. “We have not found any evidence that the college had direct ownership [of the enslaved people]. It was often a member of the Board of Trustees or a professor that would lease that individual to the college.”
Students dug up buttons, tobacco pipes, writing slates, bottle fragments, pieces of pottery and gun flints dating from 1776 to about 1820.
After completing the survey, the excavators re-covered the Academy House foundation with soil. “It’s very difficult to preserve these early remains if they’re exposed to weather and air,” Pearson said. The college plans to outline the foundation with aboveground bricks or tiles and install interpretive signs.
Although Patrick Henry was an Anglican, he was influenced by Presbyterian preacher Samuel Davies and remained sympathetic to dissenting religious thought. He was elected to the academy’s Board of Trustees on Nov. 8, 1775, along with James Madison. The ultimate Hampden-Sydney dad, Henry sent seven sons there. He helped the academy secure a charter from the state in 1783, officially making it a college.
On April 19, 1775, Patriot militiamen engaged with British soldiers at Lexington and Concord, leading to the shot heard ’round the world. The next day, land was surveyed for Hampden-Sydney. Said Pearson: “It’s sort of a happy coincidence that the country and Hampden-Sydney are the exact same age, essentially.”
