The classical school from which Washington and Lee descended was established in 1749 by Scots-Irish Presbyterian pioneers and soon named Augusta Academy,[7] about 20 miles (32 km) north of its present location.

[10] Chavis accomplished much in his life including fighting in the American Revolution, studying at both Liberty Hall and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), becoming an ordained Presbyterian minister, and opening a school that instructed white and poor black students in North Carolina.

In 1796, George Washington endowed the academy with $20,000 in the form of 100 shares of James River Canal stock, at the time one of the largest gifts ever given to an educational institution in the United States.

But according to a contemporary history, the rabble broke through the barriers and created pandemonium, which ended only when college officials demolished the whiskey barrel with an axe.

[citation needed] In the Fall of 1865, Robert E. Lee, the former general of the Confederacy, accepted an offer to become president of Washington College.

Despite suffering financial hardship at the time and having offers for several business opportunities, he said he chose to become the college president because he wanted to train "young men to do their duty".

That was a radical idea: engineering, journalism, and law had always been considered technical crafts, not intellectual endeavors, and the study of business was viewed with skepticism.

Lee's emphasis on student self-governance for Washington College remains the distinguishing character of the student-run Honor System today.

For many years ODK's annual convocation was held at the school in University Chapel on or about Robert E. Lee's birthday, January 19, in conjunction with a board of trustees-mandated holiday/Lee commemoration called "Founders Day", a version of the Robert E. Lee Day birthday holiday still officially celebrated in a few southern states.

The society recognizes achievement in the five areas of scholarship; athletics; campus/community service, social/religious activities, and campus government; journalism, speech and the mass media; and creative and performing arts.

In his letter, President Kenneth P. Ruscio publicly apologized for the school's ownership of about 80 enslaved people during the period from 1826 to 1852, some of whom were forced to build a dormitory on campus.

[29] The central core of the campus, including the row of brick buildings that form the Colonnade, are a designated National Historic Landmark District for their architecture.

[33] In 1926, the poet and dramatist John Drinkwater, author of Robert E. Lee and other plays, wrote of W&L, "This Lexington university is one of the loveliest spots in the world.

"[36] In recent years, Washington and Lee has invested heavily in upgrading and expanding its academic, residential, athletic, research, arts and extracurricular facilities.

Lewis Hall, the 30-year-old home of the law school, as well as athletic fields and the antebellum Historic Front Campus buildings, are all currently undergoing major renovation.

[42] Washington and Lee's honor system does not have a list of rules that define punishable behavior—beyond the traditional guide of the offenses lying, cheating or stealing.

[54] In 2015, The Economist ranked Washington and Lee first among all undergraduate institutions in the United States in terms of the positive gap between its students' actual median earnings ten years from graduation and what the publication's statistical model would suggest.

[65] Every four years, the school sponsors the Washington and Lee Mock Convention for whichever political party (Democratic or Republican) does not hold the presidency.

The photos eventually became the basis of a one-woman exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.[citation needed] Secretariat, who holds the record for the fastest time in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont Stakes, and the winner of the Triple Crown in 1973, wore royal blue and white (as shown in the 2010 film) because his co-owner, Christopher Chenery, was a graduate and trustee of Washington and Lee.

[72] A Washington and Lee art history professor, Pamela Hemenway Simpson, in 1999 wrote the first scholarly book on linoleum, giving it the title Cheap, Quick and Easy.

Washington and Lee is home to a collection of 18th- and 19th-century Chinese and European porcelain, the gift of Euchlin Dalcho Reeves, a 1927 graduate of the law school, and his wife, Louise Herreshoff.

In 1967, Reeves contacted Washington and Lee about making "a small gift", which turned out to be a collection of porcelain so vast that it filled two entire houses which he and his wife owned in Providence, Rhode Island.

Soon it was discovered that the frames actually contained Impressionist-like paintings created by Herreshoff as a young woman in the early days of the century.

It has been recorded by virtually every important jazz and swing musician, including Glenn Miller (with Tex Beneke on vocals), Louis Armstrong, Kay Kyser, Hal Kemp and the Dukes of Dixieland.

Washington and Lee University is the alma mater of three United States Supreme Court justices, a Nobel Prize laureate, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Emmy Award, as well as 27 U.S. senators, 67 U.S. representatives, 31 state governors, as well as numerous other government officials, judges, business leaders, entertainers, and athletes.

Several well-known alumni include past American Bar Association President Linda Klein (School of Law), Utah Governor Spencer Cox (School of Law), Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, Virginia Governor Linwood Holton, United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.; United States Senator John Warner from Virginia; United States Solicitor General John W. Davis, Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States during the 1924 presidential election; author Tom Wolfe, founder of New Journalism; broadcast journalist Roger Mudd; Anglican bishop Steve Breedlove; artist Cy Twombly; voice actor Mike Henry; Federal Judge and Civil Rights champion John Minor Wisdom; billionaire Rupert Johnson Jr. of Franklin Templeton Investments; financial journalist, and non-fiction writer Mary Childs and Mark Sappenfield, editor-in-chief of The Christian Science Monitor.

Archives of the papers of notable alumni and other resources relating to the history of the institution may be found in the manuscript collections at Washington and Lee's James Graham Leyburn Library.

[77] A fictionalized representation of the institution appears in L'Étudiant étranger by Philippe Labro (1986, Editions Gallimard), translated into English two years later and published as The Foreign Student (Ballantine Books).

[78] Other novels about Washington and Lee University include Geese in the Forum (Knopf, 1940) by Lawrence Edward Watkin, a professor of English who went on to become a screenwriter for Disney (the college faculty were the titular geese); The Hero (Julian Messner, 1949), by Millard Lampell, filmed as Saturday's Hero, starring Donna Reed and John Derek (Columbia Studios, 1951), about a football player who struggles to balance athletics, academics and a social life; and A Sound of Voices Dying by Glenn Scott (E.P.

The Russian-born American author Maxim D. Shrayer depicted a fictionalized version of the Washington & Lee campus in the story "Trout Fishing in Virginia" (2007), included in his collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam (2009).