Sweet Briar College Historic District

Sweet Briar College occupies a rural 3,300-acre campus south of Amherst, and a 27.22-acre core of it forms this historic district. Twenty-two brick buildings erected between 1906 and 1931 follow the designs of Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram, working with Lynchburg associate Pendleton S. Clark. They include six dormitories, the former refectory, a library, administration and classroom buildings, a gymnasium, a student health center and ten faculty residences. Built in Georgian Revival style, they feature Flemish-bond brick with glazed headers, slate roofs, stone or wood trim, and colonnades linking many of the buildings. Cram's plan, shaped by Beaux Arts ideas, arranges the campus on intersecting axes and draws on Jefferson's University of Virginia. Cost forced a scaled-back plan, and his formal landscape gave way to a naturalistic design associated with Richmond landscape architect Charles Gillette. The district was recognized for its architecture, as the work of Cram and his firm, and for a campus plan that remained largely true to his scheme from 1906 to 1942. Five later buildings fall outside this group.