Episcopal High School (Alexandria, Virginia)

• 1. Introduction

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  Episcopal High School sits on a hilltop in Alexandria, Virginia, about five miles from the United States Capitol, and has been shaping young minds since 1839. The Rev. William N. Pendleton opened the school with just 35 boys and three assistant heads. Within a year, enrollment had tripled to more than 100 students. For the next three decades, Episcopal was the only high school for hundreds of miles in any direction, earning it the affectionate nickname "The High School" across the South. What does it mean for a school founded by a diocese, shaped by war, and transformed by integration to survive nearly two centuries and still draw students from 25 countries? And why does a Croatian national football team preparing for a World Cup choose this campus as their base camp?

• 2. Founded in War and Faith

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  When the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia established the school in 1839, it bought 80 acres of land in the Seminary Hill neighborhood of Alexandria for $5,000. The campus shares deep roots with the neighboring Virginia Theological Seminary, and for decades the two institutions were governed by the same board of trustees appointed by the Diocese. They were incorporated together in 1854 under the name "Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary and High School in Virginia." It was not until 1923 that Episcopal broke from the diocese and came to be run by an independent board of trustees.

  The school's first building had a distinguished pedigree before Pendleton ever set foot on the grounds. The central administration building, Hoxton House, dates to around 1805 and was built by Elizabeth Parke Custis Law, Martha Washington's eldest granddaughter. The campus carried this weight of history into the Civil War, when Union Army forces occupied Alexandria in 1861 and the school closed its doors immediately. About 500 students served as soldiers in the conflict, the majority of them on the Confederate side. Fourteen alumni fought for the North. Among those who fought for the Confederacy was Pendleton himself, who rose to the rank of brigadier general. Pendleton Hall on campus holds a memorial to the 68 student-alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy.

  For the five years the school was shut, its buildings were repurposed as a Union hospital. The poet Walt Whitman served as a nurse in that hospital, lending a strange literary footnote to the school's wartime interruption. When Episcopal reopened in 1866 under new principal William Fowler Gardner, the long work of rebuilding began.

• 3. Launcelot Blackford's Long Tenure

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  Launcelot Minor Blackford took over as principal in 1870 and held the position until 1913, a span of more than four decades. His tenure transformed Episcopal from a recovering post-war institution into a serious academic force. Blackford introduced a modern academic curriculum and, perhaps more durably, pioneered interscholastic team sports in the South. Under his leadership, Episcopal fielded football, baseball, and track programs at a time when organized competition between schools was a novelty in the region.

  In 1892, Episcopal enrolled its first international students, who came from China. The school was already reaching outward in smaller ways. In 1888, it had adopted black and blue as its school colors. That choice did not last long. After losing a few games, a visiting opponent reportedly quipped that EHS had been beaten black and blue. The school promptly changed its colors to maroon and black, which they remain today.

  Also in 1888, students published the first issue of The Chronicle, the school's monthly newspaper. That same publication has run continuously ever since. The school yearbook, Whispers, began appearing annually in 1903, and the student literary magazine, The Daemon, followed in 1957. The academic historian E. Digby Baltzell later recognized Episcopal in his book The Protestant Establishment, naming it one of the sixteen most selective boarding schools in the United States.

• 4. Integration and Coeducation

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  In September 1968, Episcopal admitted its first African-American students under the presidency of Archibald R. Hoxton Jr. Two students, Regi Burns and Sam Paschall, both of the class of 1972, enrolled with support from the Stouffer Foundation, which had taken an active role in placing African-American students at prep schools across the South. Their enrollment carried the weight of a board resolution made in 1965, which stated that any and all applicants would be considered on an equal basis after giving due regard to their scholastic preparedness and their ability and desire to meet the school's standards.

  The school's next transformation came in 1991, when Episcopal enrolled its first 48 girls, a cohort that became known simply as "The First 48." The first coeducational class graduated in 1993. Today, roughly half the student body is female, and by the 2025-26 school year, 40 percent of students identified as people of color, a figure the school reports as consistently ahead of the national boarding school average.

• 5. A Campus Built Over Generations

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  The 130-acre campus includes 26 buildings, with 41 acres set aside as forested land known as Laird Acres. The physical plant has grown incrementally over nearly two centuries, each generation leaving its mark on the hilltop. In 1891, Baltimore architect James Crawford Neilson was commissioned to build Liggett Hall. In the 1910s, architect Frederick H. Brooke updated the main hall and oversaw the expansion of additional buildings.

  The Stewart Gymnasium, known to students as Stew, went up in 1913 at a cost of $30,000, replacing an earlier gym built in 1877. A century later, in 2014, the firm Voith and Mactavish Architects renovated Stew at a cost of $9.5 million, converting it into the student center. The 580-seat Callaway Chapel, built in 1990, was designed by Walton Madden Cooper architects of Maryland. Its north-facing Palladian facade opens into a curved entryway and semicircular wooden trusses, rising to a giant stained glass oculus window above the altar. The chapel is named for Patrick Henry Callaway, a faculty member who served Episcopal for 70 years, from 1916 until 1986.

  The Baker Science Center, completed in 2005, is a 34,000-square-foot LEED-certified building with a two-story glass rotunda. Graham Gund Architects designed it, and it won the Northern Virginia NAIOP Best Institutional Facility Award. Most recently, in 2023, two new dormitories added 72,700 square feet of space using a geothermal system at a cost of $45 million. The deButts Health and Wellness Center, completed at the same time, is a two-story, 17,000-square-foot facility with 12 staff members and dedicated spaces for clinical care, health education, a yoga studio, and the Jesse W. Couch Counseling Center.

• 6. Academics and the Washington Program

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  With 96 full-time faculty members and an average class size of 11, Episcopal maintains a student-to-faculty ratio of 4.6 to 1. The school offers more than 150 courses, of which at least 75 are at honors or advanced level. Episcopal no longer offers Advanced Placement courses as a standard program, though students in advanced classes may still sit for AP exams.

  The Washington Program builds the proximity to the capital directly into the daily schedule. A two-and-a-half-hour flex block, scheduled in afternoons and evenings, is dedicated to class visits throughout the surrounding Washington area. Every teacher participates, and together they organize more than 650 experiences per year. The McCain-Ravenel Center for Intellectual and Moral Courage, established in 2018, coordinates much of this outreach. It is named for Senator John McCain, an alumnus of the class of 1954, and for his mentor at EHS, William Bee Ravenel III. The center connects students with externships, global programs, and visiting speakers from government, business, and public life.

• 7. Athletics and World Soccer

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  Episcopal fields 52 interscholastic teams across 19 sports. The boys' teams compete in the Interstate Athletic Conference, where Episcopal has won 48 IAC championships since 1979 and 30 Virginia Independent School State Championships since 1930. The girls' teams compete in the Independent School League, with 41 ISL championships since 1993, including the school's first-ever ISL tournament title, which came in 2010 in field hockey.

  Football carries a particular weight of tradition. Episcopal has played Woodberry Forest School every fall since 1901, a rivalry described as the longest-running consecutive high-school football rivalry in the South and one of the oldest in the country. The game alternates between Orange and Alexandria each year. Under head coach Panos Voulgaris, the football team won back-to-back IAC championships in 2015 and 2016, and the 2016 squad was ranked in the Washington Post Top 10 for the first time in more than 25 years.

  The boys' soccer team put together one of the program's most striking seasons in 2008, finishing with a 23-0-0 record and defeating Norfolk Academy 4-0 in the VISAA Championship final to become number one in Virginia. The team finished ranked thirteenth nationally that year. In 2009, a second consecutive state championship followed.

  The soccer fields have drawn attention well beyond Virginia. The Alexandria Reds of the National Premier Soccer League and the Washington Spirit of the National Women's Soccer League have both used the facilities. The United States women's national soccer team trained at Episcopal before leaving for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil. In July 2025, Al Ain FC used the campus as a base camp during the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup. Episcopal was then named an official FIFA World Cup training site in 2025 and will serve as the base camp for the Croatia national football team during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

• 8. Notable Alumni

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  Episcopal's alumni list reaches across American public life, military history, and culture over nearly two centuries. John McCain of the class of 1954 became a Republican senator from Arizona and the 2008 Republican Party nominee for the presidency. Newton D. Baker served as Secretary of War from 1916 to 1921 and founded the law firm Baker Hostetler. Kenneth Claiborne Royall holds the distinction of being both the last Secretary of War and the first Secretary of the Army.

  The list extends well beyond government. Virginius Dabney edited the Richmond Times-Dispatch from 1936 to 1969 and won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Alex S. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for Specialized Reporting. Paul DePodesta served as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Julian Robertson became one of the most prominent financiers of the late twentieth century, and Louis Bacon earned a place on the Forbes 400.

  Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of President Theodore Roosevelt, attended Episcopal, as did John Campbell Greenway, who served alongside Colonel Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War and commanded infantry in World War I. Yan Huiqing, who lived from 1877 to 1950, served as Premier of the Republic of China. T. Berry Brazelton became a celebrated pediatrician and created the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, a tool still used to assess newborn behavior. Horace Smithy, a cardiac surgeon, performed some of the early heart valve surgeries that helped establish modern cardiac medicine. The endowment currently stands at $382 million, and the school's seven-year Courage campaign, launched in 2018 and completed in 2025, raised $157 million toward the campus and programs that continue to produce alumni of that reach.