Before there was a college here, there was a resort. From 1820 to 1841, Botetourt Springs drew visitors to its mineral waters in the Roanoke Valley. When the resort failed, its buildings passed to a short-lived seminary, then in 1842 to Valley Union Seminary, founded by Baptist minister Joshua Bradley as a coeducational school. Bradley left for Missouri in 1845, and the trustees hired a 25-year-old math instructor from Richmond named Charles Lewis Cocke. He would shape the institution for the next half century. In 1851, Cocke abolished the men's department. By 1852, the school had become the Roanoke Female Seminary. In 1855, John and Ann Halsey Hollins of Lynchburg gave $5,000, and the school took the name it still bears.

Charles Lewis Cocke ran Hollins as a family business and a paternal mission. The school was built and maintained partly through the labor of enslaved people; in 1846, Cocke had also established the first school for enslaved people in the Roanoke area, though many of those students worked at the seminary. After emancipation, Hollins employed many formerly enslaved women whose names the institution did not record - and the college handbook of the era instructed students to ignore them. When Cocke died, his daughter Matty took over and presided for decades, intent on preserving what she called the genteel atmosphere her father had cultivated. Accreditation came late. Only in 1932, after a scathing letter from alumna Eudora Ramsay Richardson and pressure from the presidents of Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr, did the Cocke family hand the school to a board of trustees.

In 1959, Hollins started one of the first writer-in-residence programs in America. The graduate program in creative writing followed in 1960, founded by Louis D. Rubin Jr. What came next is hard to explain by numbers alone. Annie Dillard, class of 1967, won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - named for the same Tinker Mountain that students climb each October. Henry S. Taylor, who earned his M.A. in 1966, won the Pulitzer for poetry. Natasha Trethewey, M.A. 1991, won a third. Kiran Desai, M.A. 1994, took the Man Booker Prize. Margaret Wise Brown, who graduated in 1932, would later write Goodnight Moon. Beth Macy, M.A. 1993, wrote Dopesick. The reference book Creative Writing in America called the program the most productive in the country, and the math behind that claim is hard to argue with.

The campus that holds these stories sits in a wooded valley north of Roanoke, framed by the Blue Ridge. The Hollins College Quadrangle, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, consists of six contributing buildings spanning seven decades of construction. The East Building went up in 1856, the Main building in 1861. Bradley Chapel followed in 1883, the octagonal Botetourt Hall in 1890, and the Charles Cocke Memorial Library in 1908. Earlier buildings were inherited from the Botetourt Springs resort. Tinker Mountain rises just to the east - a Blue Ridge foothill that gives Annie Dillard's most famous book its name and gives the college its strangest, most beloved ritual. Since 1903, the secret society Freya has walked the campus at night in black-hooded robes carrying candles to mark events of importance, animated by the belief that concern for the community is a creative and active force.