The Alexandria Lyceum

Here follows an excerpt from the Clio Foundation website about the Alexandria Lyceum as written by Alex Wemm and Zack Rakes:

Introduction
The Alexandria Lyceum is a building with one of the most storied histories in the city of Alexandria. Built in the Greek Revival style, the Lyceum has seen use as a home, a hospital, a lecture hall, and today, a museum of the history of the city of Alexandria. In addition to being an extensive city museum, the Lyceum is also available to rent for private events, echoing its original function as a lecture hall in years gone by.

Backstory and Context
In the 1820s, a movement for public education was gaining momentum in the United States, and this was especially so among a group of like-minded individuals in Alexandria. This group, headed by a Quaker teacher named Benjamin Hallowell, formed the Alexandria Lyceum and began to give lectures and host debates in the town in 1838, which quickly became popular among citizens of the town. Most of these events concerned biology and philosophy, as religion and politics were avoided because they were always topics of heated contention. These had become so popular that by 1839, the organization decided that it needed to expand to fit the needs of those attending. By December 12, 1839, the Lyceum had a proper building constructed for the use of the organization, and it remained as such for two decades.

For the next century, the Lyceum continually switched hands of ownership. In 1861, it was taken by the Union and used as an army hospital; in 1868, it was purchased and made into a home which changed hands several times; in 1938, it was made into an office building; by the 1960s, the building was run down and was scheduled for demolition. Preservationists brought forth a call to preserve and refurbish the building, however, and the Alexandria City Council ultimately voted in favor of restoring the building in 1969. In 1974, renovations were complete and the Lyceum became the first Bicentennial Center in Virginia, and in 1985, it became Alexandria’s museum of city history. Today, the Lyceum has resumed its original role as an educational and intellectual hub for the city.


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Here follows an excerpt from the City of Alexandria website:

Lyceum Hall Hospital
The Lyceum was built as library and meeting hall in 1839, and is now a City museum. During the war, the Lyceum Hall held 80 beds, and served as a ward of the nearby Downtown Baptist Church General Hospital.

History of the Lyceum Hall Hospital
201 S. Washington Street

Built as library and meeting hall in 1839, for two decades before the Civil War The Lyceum was the intellectual and cultural center of Alexandria, but the war interrupted its educational activities. Like most of the other large structures in town, the building was seized in the spring of 1861 for use by the Union Army. The Lyceum Hall held 80 beds, and in 1862 served as a ward of the nearby Downtown Baptist Church General Hospital.

First Person Accounts
The occupation of Alexandria by Union troops forever changed the social, cultural and economic fabric of the old seaport town. For four years, Alexandria was an occupied city, enduring the longest military occupation by Union troops of any town during the conflict. We are fortunate to have a number of first-person accounts of this trying period of Alexandria’s history.

Clarissa Jones head nurse at the Baptist Church hospital in Alexandria, wrote a letter from the Lyceum Hospital, dated September 12, 1862.

Clarissa Jones, Nurse
Clarissa Jones was the head nurse at the Baptist Church hospital in Alexandria. The following excerpt is from a letter from Nurse Jones, dated September 12, 1862, courtesy The National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Frederick, Maryland. The letter was displayed at the Lyceum, in the 2014 exhibition Occupied City: Life in Civil War Alexandria. Nurse Clarissa Jones, writes of turning away Southern sympathizing women who try to bring things to the Confederate POW patients at the Baptist Church hospital.

We have 9 Sesesh prisoners in the Church opposite to which we belong, being under the same officers, etc. Certain females come daily with grapes, peaches & the like to give to them [Confederate POW patients] alone --- that is not allowable, for all the good things sent to the institution are equally divided, and this we explain, but not to their satisfaction. They become terribly worked up and in a majority of cases go off with their contributions. They do not understand what it is to be lady-like in their conversation or behavior. We have a flag over the door now to keep them out; they have a holy horror of the article and even to attend to their own sick will hardly subject themselves to the degradation of coming under it
September 12, 1862

Quartermaster Map
Quartermaster Map Sheet 12 shows the Lyceum and other nearby hospitals.

Location and the Site Today
The hospital was located at 201 S. Washington Street. Today, Alexandria History Museum at The Lyceum is open to the public, and owned and operated by the City of Alexandria.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Out of the Attic" column from the Alexandria Times newspaper:

The long road to public use for the Lyceum
Alexandria Times, September 19, 2013

The handsome new wood shingle roof installed at The Lyceum, the city’s history museum, over the past several weeks brings to mind the unusual history of one of Alexandria’s finest Greek Revival-style buildings.

The Lyceum was constructed in 1839 after the lot at 201 S. Washington St. was purchased by local schoolmaster Benjamin Hallowell and a group of associates. They had formed The Alexandria Lyceum several years earlier to develop a center of classical knowledge and scientific learning for the residents of the prospering city.

Partnering with The Alexandria Library — then a private, subscription-based organization — the group moved book collections as well as natural history and scientific exhibits into to the new building to enhance public learning opportunities. For more than two decades, The Lyceum, named after the Greek gymnasium near Athens where Aristotle taught, was used for public lectures, concerts and enlightened entertainment, featuring such personalities as Tom Thumb and Edgar Allan Poe.

During the Civil War, Union forces seized the large building for use as a military hospital, and the collections of books and exhibits were removed. When the war was over, the building was acquired by John Daingerfield and converted into a home for his daughter, Mary.

Later in the early 20th century, it was sold to physician Hugh McGuire and his wife, socially prominent Alexandrians, as seen in this photograph taken about 1918. Hugh McGuire was named after his grandfather, Hugh Holmes McGuire, a prominent eye surgeon from Winchester, and his father was the noted physician, educator and orator Hunter Holmes McGuire.

Hunter McGuire, as a Confederate soldier and doctor, vainly tried to save the life of Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson, mortally wounded by friendly fire at Chancellorsville. After the war, Hunter McGuire returned to his Richmond home, where he eventually became president of the American Medical Association and an early leader in the eugenics movement.

By the 1960s, The Lyceum housed an office building, and its architectural features became seriously neglected. Threatened with demolition, it was saved and converted into the nation’s first bicentennial center in 1974.

The City of Alexandria acquired the building for use as a general history museum, which opened in 1985. “Out of the Attic” is published each week in the Alexandria Times newspaper. The column began in September 2007 as “Marking Time” and explored Alexandria’s history through collection items, historical images and architectural representations. Within the first year, it evolved into “Out of the Attic” and featured historical photographs of Alexandria.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Out of the Attic" column from the Alexandria Times newspaper:

The Lyceum: From salon of learning to makeshift hospital
Alexandria Times, March 16, 2017

When legendary schoolmaster Benjamin Hallowell founded The Lyceum, Alexandria’s adult center for learning and knowledge, in 1839, he anticipated the inclusion of the town library, exhibits on natural history and life sciences, and lectures on topics of interest to learned people of the town.

But even Hallowell, a prominent Quaker and avid abolitionist, could not have projected the destructive forces that would tear the nation apart just two decades later, and put an end to his legacy of a local institution for popular education.

When the Civil War reached Alexandria in the spring of 1861, public expectations were high that a resolution to the conflict would take only a matter of weeks. But after the first Battle of Bull Run in July of that year, many residents realized that the rout of Union forces there meant a prolonged military commitment and escalation was in the offing.

Alexandria was soon besieged by hundreds of wounded soldiers being moved from battlefields to the west and south, with little in the way of medical facilities to address even their basic needs. Union Army authorities were forced to develop a plan for emergency care, and quickly commandeered large buildings and homes in the occupied city, and transformed them into hospitals within days.

This seizure of private property barely gave owners or building occupants time to make orderly arrangements for their possessions before eviction. In addition to the wounded, growing numbers of soldiers and civilians were sickened from deteriorating sanitary conditions, and these wrenching patients were often triaged on surrounding sidewalks awaiting room in available institutions.

The majestic Lyceum building, one of the city’s finest examples of Greek Revival architecture, was one of the earlier buildings taken for medical purposes, and its contents of books and exhibits were abandoned to the surrounding sidewalks to make way for the 80 beds that were installed on both floors of the structure.

Renamed Lyceum Hall Hospital, this 1862 view of the hospital taken by the official military photographer Andrew Russell shows Union troops just within the cast iron fence around the facility. The adjacent area of South Washington Street eventually grew into a major medical and Contraband social service center serving escaped slaves who had sought refuge in Alexandria from the deep South.

Among the care facilities added were the Downtown Baptist Church, two adjoining residences at 321 and 323 S. Washington St., and a smallpox hospital near the south end of the street that at the time terminated at Great Hunting Creek. Day and night, bloodied doctors and nurses crisscrossed the wide roadway endlessly attending to their ever-growing list of patients.

The Downtown Baptist Church was closed and confiscated in 1862, after the pastor refused a directive to say a prayer for President Abraham Lincoln. It was immediately outfitted as a hospital with 150 beds, while the smaller Lyceum Hall Hospital, directly across the street, was then designated as a ward of the larger facility.

In 1863, the twin houses one block south were identified for use as the Contrabands Hospital and School, but these homes were too small and ill equipped to handle the exploding numbers of Contrabands reaching the city.

Three months after being established, the poorly resourced hospital was described by social relief worker Julia Wilbur as having only ten female patients, attended to by an untrained nurse who slept on the floor. Beds and blankets were scarce at the segregated hospital, while piles of similar government-issued supplies were stored nearby for Union soldiers.

By 1864, the deaths of Contrabands from illness rose into the hundreds, and land across from the Smallpox Hospital was confiscated for the Contrabands and Freedmen’s Cemetery.

“Out of the Attic” is published each week in the Alexandria Times newspaper. The column began in September 2007 as “Marking Time” and explored Alexandria’s history through collection items, historical images and architectural representations. Within the first year, it evolved into “Out of the Attic” and featured historical photographs of Alexandria.

These articles appear with the permission of the Alexandria Times and were authored by Amy Bertsch, former Public Information Officer, and Lance Mallamo, Director, on behalf of the Office of Historic Alexandria.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Out of the Attic" column from the Alexandria Times newspaper:

Julia Wheelock: teacher, sister, nurse, author
Alexandria Times, March 22, 2018

Built by The Lyceum Company in 1839, The Lyceum served many purposes through the 19th and 20th centuries – lecture hall, performance space, library, meeting space, Civil War hospital, private home, office building, the Commonwealth’s first Bicentennial Center and now, the city’s history museum.

One person who passed through when The Lyceum, or Lyceum Hall as it was then known, served as a hospital was Julia Wheelock, a teacher from Michigan. In September 1861 her brother Orville enlisted in the Eighth Michigan Infantry. A year later, Julia learned that her brother had been seriously wounded during the Battle of Chantilly. He laid several days on the field, had a limb amputated and was finally taken to a hospital in Alexandria – Lyceum Hall.

She travelled to Alexandria with Orville’s wife Anna and Anna’s sister Sarah and began searching for Orville. On arriving in wartime Alexandria, she wrote in her diary, “Soon the ancient city of Alexandria – ancient in American history – heaves in sight. It presents a gloomy, dingy, dilapidated appearance.”

As they searched for Orville, Anna lost hope and shared that he had come to her in a dream, telling her, “My work is done, I’m weary and must rest.” They witnessed a funeral procession during their search, and Julia noted, “How unlike a funeral at home! No train of weeping friends follow his bier; yet one of our country’s heroes, one of the ‘boys in white,’ lies in that plain coffin.” They went to Lyceum Hall, and after much confusion, the director of the hospital told them that Orville had died there a week earlier. Julia noted that, like the soldier in the procession they saw earlier, her brother “died like thousands of others, far from home and friends, with no loved kindred near.”

She also noted, however, that they spent time at Lyceum Hall with “an angel of mercy in human form … Miss [Clarissa] F. Jones, of Philadelphia.” Miss Jones had “watched [Orville] day by day as he grew weaker, she stood beside him in his dying moments, held his icy hand in hers, wiped the death dew from his brow, received his last message for his wife and child, and, when life had fled, prepared him as far as she could for his burial. Such are her daily duties.”

Anna and Sarah returned to Michigan, heartbroken. Julia, however, stayed in Alexandria and joined the Michigan Relief Association, a group focused on caring for Michigan troops. She assisted nurses, fed soldiers, wrote letters home for soldiers and provided general care and support for the suffering wounded. She also traveled to the front to care for wounded immediately after battles.

After the war, Julia worked for the Treasury Department in Washington D.C., returning to Michigan in 1873. She published “Boys in White, Experiences of a Hospital Agent in and Around Washington” in 1870, drawing from her diaries to recount her wartime experiences.

“Out of the Attic” is published each week in the Alexandria Times newspaper. The column began in September 2007 as “Marking Time” and explored Alexandria’s history through collection items, historical images and architectural representations. Within the first year, it evolved into “Out of the Attic” and featured historical photographs of Alexandria.

These articles appear with the permission of the Alexandria Times and were authored by staff of the Office of Historic Alexandria.