Hampton Institute

Hampton Institute occupies a campus beside the Hampton River on the former Little Scotland Plantation. It began after the Civil War, when many freed slaves gathered at Hampton. Samuel Chapman Armstrong urged the American Missionary Association to buy a farm there, and the school opened in 1868 with two teachers and fifteen pupils. It was chartered in 1870 and later became an accredited college. Its early buildings form the architectural core of the campus. Richard Morris Hunt designed the massive Virginia Hall, completed in 1874 and built largely by students, and the plain Academic Hall of 1882. J. C. Cady designed the Romanesque Memorial Church with its tall campanile. The early nineteenth-century Mansion House and the 1878 Wigwam dormitory also survive. Booker T. Washington attended the school. Listing recognized the institute as one of the earliest and most distinguished Negro educational institutions in the country.