{"nrhp_refnum":"78001981","name":"St. Mary's College","other_names":["See Also:St.Mary's Chapel"],"category":"district","location":{"address":"St. Marys and Hillsborough Sts.","address_restricted":false,"city":"Raleigh","county":"Wake County","state":"NC","lat":35.78313629200005,"lon":-78.65175877804487,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1978-12-19","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Education","Architecture"],"significance_levels":["state"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A campus of about twenty-three wooded acres near the center of Raleigh, North Carolina, containing about twenty-five buildings from the 1830s onward, centred on Smedes Hall and the East and West Rock buildings. It is the site of St. Mary's College, a school founded in 1842.","why_significant":"The nomination argues the campus is significant for its association with the education of women in the antebellum and postwar periods, and for its collection of buildings embodying several architectural periods from antebellum through Victorian and Neo-Classical styles. It also notes the campus's wartime role, when students and refugees were housed there and Union troops camped in the grove in 1865.","narrative":"Set in a wooded campus of about twenty-three acres close to the Raleigh state Capitol, St. Mary's began in the 1830s as an Episcopal school for boys. Its earliest buildings, the granite-walled East and West Rocks of 1834 and 1835, were built from stone left over from the Capitol's construction. Smedes Hall, a four-storey brick building begun in 1835 by contractor William S. Drummond, anchors the grounds. Reopened as a girls' school in 1842 under Reverend Aldert Smedes, the institution educated young women from across the South for more than a century. Its campus shows the sequence of styles from the Greek Revival of the antebellum period to the Gothic and Neo-Classical work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it preserves a rare green space in a city that has largely lost its Hillsborough Street mansions.","period_of_significance":"1800-1899","architect_builder":"William S. Drummond (builder of Smedes Hall); C. E. Hartge (architect of the early twentieth-century Neo-Classical buildings); Richard Upjohn (attributed designer of the chapel)","architectural_style":"Greek Revival; Neo-Classical Revival; Gothic Revival; Late Gothic Revival; Neo-Colonial","criteria":["A","C"],"status_note":"The school remains in operation and the campus continues to serve as a college with high school and associate degree programs.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-haiku-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.1-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 17:11:41.446956-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/68/7225/47722568/content/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_NC/78001981.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/78001981/0a3346fe89-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/78001981/0a3346fe89-1600.webp","licence":"CC BY-SA 3.0","author":"Abbylabar","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Mary%27s_School.JPG\" rel=\"noopener\">Abbylabar</a>, <a href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0\" rel=\"license noopener\">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Mary%27s_School.JPG"},"district":{"nrhp_refnum":"74001380","name":"Oakwood Historic District","url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/districts/north-carolina/oakwood-historic-district-74001380/"},"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/47722568","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Mary%27s_School_(Raleigh,_North_Carolina)","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7401843"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/north-carolina/wake-county/st-marys-college-78001981/"}