St. Mary's College

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.