Preston and Olin Institute
The Preston and Olin Institute was a Methodist academy for boys in Blacksburg, Virginia which operated from 1851 to 1872. They chose the name Preston for Colonel William Ballard Preston, of nearby Smithfield Plantation, a well-known Montgomery County businessman, farmer, and statesman and a nationally known politician. The Methodist Church selected the name Olin after Stephen Olin, a beloved Methodist minister and former president of Randolph-Macon College. Olin and Preston Institute, a school for boys, opened in 1851, with William R. White as principal. The town already had a school for girls: the Blacksburg Female Academy, incorporated by legislative act in 1840. Until it was rechartered in 1869, it was named The Olin and Preston Institute. The institute fell into financial trouble in its later years and in 1872, in conjunction with strong lobbying by local residents and its principal, Thomas Nelson Conrad, the academy was selected to be reorganized as the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Tech), the state's primary land grant institution under the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act. Due to the specific stipulations in the Morrill Act regarding racial equality, the new institution had to be either racially integrated or the state had to establish a second institution for people of color. Virginia chose the latter, and as such, the newly founded Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College would receive only two-thirds of the land grant funding, and the remaining one-third went to Hampton Institute a black college in Hampton. In 1920 the Commonwealth transferred the black land grant funding to the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University) in Petersburg, Virginia, an institution organized for African-Americans, and Virginia's first state-supported historically black college.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Preston and Olin Institute (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).Preston and Olin Institute
Alumni Mall, Blacksburg
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Geographical coordinates (GPS)
| Latitude | Longitude |
|---|---|
| N 37.231944444444 ° | E -80.418055555556 ° |
Address
Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech
Alumni Mall 190
24061 Blacksburg
Virginia, United States
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