{"nrhp_refnum":"89001915","name":"Marion Male Academy","other_names":["Marion Male High School","Dhl 119-6"],"category":"building","location":{"address":"343 College St.","address_restricted":false,"city":"Marion","county":"Smyth County","state":"VA","lat":36.831283308000025,"lon":-81.52621820899998,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1989-11-02","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Education","Architecture"],"significance_levels":["local"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A two-story, five-bay, hip-roofed brick building at 343 College Street in Marion, Smyth County, Virginia, built in the mid-1870s as a boys' academy and later converted to a dwelling, with a mid-1930s brick garage.","why_significant":"The nomination argues it is a rare surviving academy from any period in Southwest Virginia and a well-preserved example of late nineteenth-century education in Smyth County. It is also an unusually substantial academy building, carefully adapted as a house in the early twentieth century. Its kingpost roof was typically used in large institutional buildings and rarely in houses.","narrative":"Built in 1876 on the west side of Marion, Virginia, this two-story brick building began as the Marion Male Academy, a secondary school for boys founded by D.C. Miller and incorporated in 1874. It could hold 125 pupils in preparatory and academic departments, teaching Latin, Greek, English, mathematics and science. The academy closed in 1893 when a public high school opened. After standing vacant for several years, the property was sold at auction in 1901 to attorney Hayden Bell, who converted it to a residence by dividing the schoolrooms, adding corner fireplaces, rebuilding the stair and adding porches and a slate roof. Later owners kept much of that early twentieth-century detail. The building has a center-passage plan, Italianate bracketed cornice, and a massive kingpost roof structure normally found in large institutional buildings. Its survival as a school-turned-house makes it a rare example of its type in Southwest Virginia.","period_of_significance":"1876-c. 1910","architect_builder":null,"architectural_style":"Late Victorian: Italianate","criteria":["A","C"],"status_note":"Used as a single dwelling and described as being in an excellent state of maintenance.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:52:00.84417-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/78/6836/41683678/content/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_VA/89001915.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/89001915/f8e59a5da5-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/89001915/f8e59a5da5-1600.webp","licence":"CC BY-SA 3.0","author":"Skye Marthaler","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marion_Male_Academy.JPG\" rel=\"noopener\">Skye Marthaler</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:Marion_Male_Academy.JPG"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/41683678","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Male_Academy","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15247868"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/virginia/smyth-county/marion-male-academy-89001915/"}