Originally published on Preservation Virginia’s Historic Ventures Fall/Winter 2025 Issue
Ten years ago, as the Sweet Briar College Board of Directors threatened to shut down operations, the campus was placed on Preservation Virginia’s list of most endangered historic places. After all, the college was home to 22 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places and those comprising the Sweet Briar College Historic District are considered one of the finest works of a noted 20th century architect. Shuttering the campus would leave those buildings untended and at risk of deterioration.
Today, after blocking the attempted closure, raising more than $160 million and reimagining its curriculum, Sweet Briar is no longer on the endangered list. What’s more, an ambitious campaign – bolstered by a recently discovered trove of original architectural drawings – aims to restore the century-old campus and embrace traditional preservation practices. “One of the really important tasks that we have is securing the College’s future, and part of that is we don’t kick the can any further down the road on our historic infrastructure,” says Mary Pope Hutson, Sweet Briar’s president. “We must make that investment now.”
At the turn of the 20th century, the newly appointed board of the Sweet Briar Institute hired Boston-based architect Ralph Adams Cram to draw up a vision. “Sweet Briar was that rare opportunity for an architect to design an entire campus from scratch,” says Travis McDonald, who directed the restoration of Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Bedford County. “It really established Gram’s reputation.”
Cram arrived at Sweet Briar as an adherent of the Gothic Revival architecture style; in fact, he wrote four books on the subject. But when he walked across the rolling Central Virginia landscape, he decided the setting called for a different approach. His red-brick campus reflects a Georgian Revival style reminiscent of buildings he saw on his travels in Europe. He designed a campus with dormitories and a refectory arrayed on three sides of a quadrangle and with administrative and classroom buildings just beyond overlooking a grassy dell. “Mr. Gram’s vision was one of the things that inspired us,” Mary K. Benedict, Sweet Briar’s first president wrote. “The fact that we had a plan for a harmonious group of buildings from the beginning saved so much discussion that the erection of a new building often occasions in a college and kept the unity of architecture, which is always to be desired.”
The first structures erected were dorms, a classroom building, and a refectory in the central quad. They showcase Flemish-bond brickwork with dark glazed headers and wood or limestone trim. A cupola that now houses a bell sits on the end of one dormitory. Colonnades and stone balustrades connect the buildings on the central campus, as well as the administrative and classroom buildings. The Mary Helen Cochran library, added in 1929, was perhaps Gram’s most ornate design. It is a three-story, seven-bay, hip-roofed, brick building with Corinthian pilasters alternating with arched windows and Georgian Revival-style decorations above its two entrances.
Much of the work of building the campus was accomplished by local African-American workers, some of whose parents or grandparents had been enslaved at Sweet Briar before emancipation. In her book Invisible Founders: How Two Centuries of African American Families Transformed a Plantation into a College, former Sweet Briar Dean Lynn Rainville notes that Sterling Jones, the son of an enslaved man, helped carry water for the bricklayers. Some of the men developed their skills on antebellum plantations. Recent analysis shows that the sand in the brick mortar came from a local creek that now sits across U.S. Route 29 from the campus.
For Cram, his success at Sweet Briar led to commissions to design buildings at West Point, Princeton, the University of Richmond, University of Notre Dame, and Rice Institute in Texas. He began teaching architecture at MIT and served as vice president of the American Institute of Architects. Until his death in 1942, he remained attached to Sweet Briar, suggesting projects like a chapel or auditorium that could be added.
After the attempted closure in 2015, the college leadership took another look at its historic buildings with an eye toward addressing critical infrastructure issues. The Sweet Briar College Historic District had been established by the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. But many of the historic buildings were more than 100 years old and needed repairs. Hutson, who was named president in 2024, comes with a preservation pedigree. A Sweet Briar graduate, she spent four years working for the Historic Charleston Foundation and another two decades in land preservation before joining the college’s administration as a vice president in early 2016. She sits on the Virginia Board of Historic Resources.
After stabilizing Sweet Briar’s finances, she and other college leaders turned their attention to deferred maintenance and other infrastructure issues. They commissioned a conditions assessment for the historic buildings in 2019 and chose Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects -a firm that has also done assessments at Monticello, Montpellier, Mount Vernon, Poplar Forest and other historic sites in Virginia-to determine what work needed to be done. Among the architects’ first request was for original drawings and plans for the buildings. The architectural team started looking around campus for any drawings they could find. After a week of searching, they made a startling discovery in the power plant, of all places.
“We opened this door and about passed out because there’s just thousands of drawings in this room,” MCWB architect Eric Kuchar recalled in a Sweet Stories in the Dell podcast. “After opening up flat files we quickly learned that these were some original Cram drawings on original blueprints, some were on trace paper, some were renderings. It was mind-blowing.” Altogether there were about 5,000 to 7,000 drawings. Among the original blueprints were actual sketches of how Cram envisioned every building on campus. Sweet Briar brought in a conservationist to preserve hundreds of the documents.
