Qualla: Roanoke College

Roanoke College: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The school moved across Virginia in a single covered wagon. That detail tells you something about how small Virginia Collegiate Institute was when it pulled up stakes in Augusta County in 1847 and resettled in Salem, a stagecoach town on what would become Route 11. The two Lutheran pastors who ran it, David Bittle and Christopher Baughmann, were betting that Salem - then a junction of commerce and transportation in the Roanoke Valley - would give their boys' preparatory school a future. Six years later, on March 14, 1853, the Virginia General Assembly granted them a college charter. They renamed the school for the valley itself: Roanoke College.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Roanoke College: Cadets Against the Union

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roanokecollege, CC BY 2.0. Roanoke became one of the few Southern colleges to stay open throughout the American Civil War. The student body, organized into a corps of cadets, fought Confederate engagements near Salem in December 1863. They were outmatched almost immediately and forced to surrender, but the...

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Image: roanokecollege | CC BY 2.0

Roanoke College: Lamps and Palms

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit roanokecollege, CC BY 2.0. The college seal explains the place. A blue shield bearing a gold cross represents Roanoke's Lutheran roots - Roanoke is the second-oldest Lutheran-affiliated college in the United States, after Gettysburg. A white dogwood flower stands for Virginia, the state flower. A lamp abov...

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Image: roanokecollege | CC BY 2.0

Roanoke College: The Maroons and the Railway

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cdenas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Athletics at Roanoke are wrapped in maroon and gray. The teams are the Maroons; the mascot is Rooney, a maroon-tailed hawk. Roanoke joined the Old Dominion Athletic Conference as a founding member in 1976 and has since won 101 conference titles. The college took the 1972 NCAA Col...

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Image: Cdenas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roanoke College: Two Thousand Students, Forty States

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Molly Cardenas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Today Roanoke enrolls about 2,000 undergraduates drawn from roughly 40 states and 30 countries. The campus has expanded across College Avenue and onto Main Street, where the Old Salem Post Office, built in 1923, is now a college building. The Elizabeth Campus, two miles east, sit...

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Image: Molly Cardenas | CC BY-SA 3.0