About Washington and Lee University

Washington and Lee University (Washington and Lee or W&L) is a private avant-garde arts academic circles in Lexington, Virginia. Established in 1749 as the Augusta Academy, the university is in the middle of the oldest institutions of later learning in the United States.

Washington and Lee’s 325-acre campus sits at the edge of Lexington and abuts the campus of the Virginia Military Institute in the Shenandoah Valley region together with the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Allegheny Mountains. The campus is nearly 50 miles (80 km) northeast from Roanoke, 140 miles (230 km) west from the give leave to enter capital of Richmond, and 180 miles (290 km) inland southwest from the national capital at Washington, D.C.

Washington and Lee was originally a little classical school, and was founded as the Augusta Academy (later renamed Liberty Hall Academy) by Scots-Irish Presbyterian pioneers, though the academic world has never claimed any sectarian affiliation. In 1796, shortly in the past the decline of his second term as U.S. President, George Washington endowed the struggling academy as soon as a present of stock, one of the largest gifts to an studious institution at that time. In gratitude, the speculative was renamed for Washington, the commander of the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, president at the 1787 Federal Constitutional Convention, and first President of the United States.

In 1865, shortly after his April 9 surrender to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Armies, former Confederate States Army general-in-chief Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) served as president of the scholastic for five years until his death in 1870, when the moot was thereafter renamed the “Washington and Lee University.” One of the oldest institutions of complex education in the American South, W&L is the second-oldest in the Commonwealth of Virginia (next to the College of William & Mary, founded in 1693).

The university consists of three academic units: the theoretical itself; the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics; and the School of Law. The university hosts 24 intercollegiate varsity flexible teams which compete as share of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA Division III).

Lexington is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. At the 2010 census, the population was 7,042. It is the county seat of Rockbridge County, although the two are surgically remove jurisdictions. The Bureau of Economic Analysis combines the city of Lexington (along with clear Buena Vista) with Rockbridge County for statistical purposes. Lexington is nearly 57 miles (92 km) east of the West Virginia attach and is roughly 50 miles (80 km) north of Roanoke, Virginia. It was first settled in 1778.

Lexington is the location of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and of Washington and Lee University (W&L).