Hampden-Sydney College

One of the most venerable-looking collegiate landscapes in the rural South, Hampden-Sydney College was established by Presbyterians in 1776. Its Scots-Irish founders named it for John Hampden and Algernon Sydney, two seventeenth-century advocates of civil and religious freedom. Union Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institute associated with the college, faced the campus from an adjoining hillside until the seminary moved to Richmond in 1898. The earliest surviving of the remarkable group of early-nineteenth-century buildings from Hampden-Sydney and the seminary are Cushing and Venable halls (primarily dormitories), five smaller edifices that began as houses, and a chapel designed by Robert L. Dabney. They have been joined by several later buildings, many of them Colonial Revival. Two principal streets cut through the green hillsides of the twelve-hundred-acre campus—College Road, running north to south, and Via Sacra, running west to east.