History on the Hill: The Seminary’s Aspinwall Hall

This article is the second in a five-part series of historic homes in the Seminary Hill area of Alexandria.

Virginia Theological Seminary’s Aspinwall Hall today houses administrative offices for the Episcopal institution, but perhaps hundreds of men called the brick building home from the 1850s to 1940s.

Topped by an imposing white tower, the three-story hall off Seminary Road was completed in 1858. The first floor housed classrooms, while the two upper floors were student dormitories, said Rev. Robert Prichard, the seminary’s professor of church history and author of the recent pictorial book on the seminary’s history, “Hail! Holy Hill!"

The occupants were all white male students, as the seminary didn’t admit its first black student until the 1950s or women until the 1960s.

The donors to build Aspinwall Hall were brothers William Henry and John Lloyd Aspinwall, who were railroad men, Prichard said. “Their biggest coup was the built a railroad across the isthmus of Panama before the Panama Canal,” he said. “And there’s a little town to this day in Panama called Colon, which is the Spanish spelling for Columbus, originally named Aspinwall, built by the brothers for the Caribbean side.”

The Aspinwalls were among the most influential donors to the Episcopal Church in the 1800s, not only funding Aspinwall Hall but also paying for buildings at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Chicago and Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin.

During the Civil War, the campus was occupied by Union troops. Teaching stopped, and the campus was used as a hospital. To this day, visitors can see where a Wisconsin regiment volunteer scratched his name into the woodwork of the hall. 

The inscription appear to read, “Taylor.” “It is kind of interesting to see they left their mark,” Prichard said.

There were 10 dorm rooms on each floor, and each room had its own fireplace. The privy was located to the back of the building. At some point in the 1890s, the seminary constructed a porch on the second story of the front of the building. It was taken off in a renovation in the 1960s. 

“Allegedly, students have told me who were there then that people would go out their windows on the second floor and have water balloon fights with people on the other side of the dorms,” Prichard said.

Another interesting facet of the building is that the brickwork on what is now the front side of Aspinwall is of a lesser quality than the brickwork on the back end. “(The back end) was clearly designed to face downtown Alexandria, our presentation side,” Prichard said. “ … We used to claim that this dominated the Alexandria skyline and was the largest building around, but of course we were not in Alexandria until the 1950s, because Quaker Lane was the western boundary of Alexandria.”

The top of the tower also offers a view of Washington and its landmarks. “It’s a wonderful view on the top of the tower,” Prichard said. “Until the 1990s, on the Fourth of July, we opened the top of the tower and people could come up and look and watch the fireworks. 

“And then a balcony fell down at the University of Virginia, and our business office and our attorney got very worried about potential liability, so we haven’t done that since then. It used to be a kind of nice, interesting moment to get the view.”

The building today includes historical photographs, including one of the class of 1856, and a reproduction of a portrait of William Henry Aspinwall, the original of which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

The hall also has a dark chapter in its history. Mount Vernon Estate rented slaves to contractors who did work on large buildings, including the Smithsonian Castle. The seminary as an institution had no slaves, although two faculty members had slaves.

“A logical guess, but not proof, because we have no final paper trail, is that some of the servants, slaves from Mount Vernon worked in building Aspinwall Hall,” Prichard said. “We don’t know that, but the Capitol was built by slave labor, the Smithsonian by slave labor. The contractors used slave labor ... so they got all the big jobs. So that’s probably the case.”

The building’s interior has been renovated multiple times. The seminary built a new set of dormitories in the late 1940s, and eventually the upper stories of Aspinwall were abandoned and put to other uses.

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