June 23, 2006

Rebel General, College President, Gentleman

By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER

By the time Robert E. Lee reluctantly became its president, five months after surrendering at Appomattox, the institution then known as Washington College had a long history and a striking campus. It traced its origins, somewhat uncertainly, to a Presbyterian boys' school founded about 1749, and with more assurance to a school that existed in a different location by 1773. The pleasing row of colonnaded college buildings that greeted Lee in September 1865 had been finished in the 1840s,

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