GMS History The History of Greenbrier Military School | Page 2

built. Imagine an empty fair ground, or a wheat field in 1862, on the hill where the GMS tennis courts once stood (the present location of the Sharp Alumni Center). From this vantage point on the eastern hill bordering the settlement of Lewisburg, on the morning of May 23, 1862, Confederate Gen. Henry Heth attacked northern forces across the valley. Union troops under Col. George Crook were camped on the hill behind the eventual site of Greenbrier College. Col. Crook’s Ohio Brigade advanced and ultimately Gen. Heth’s troops retreated all the way down the mountain and across the Greenbrier River at Caldwell. In an hour’s battle, some 180 Confederate soldiers were dead and wounded, with 157 taken prisoner. Union casualties of dead, wounded and missing amounted to 73 (Battle of Lewisburg). A year after the Battle of Lewisburg, Greenbrier County, Virginia, became Greenbrier County, West Virginia, on June 20, 1863. Seventy-five years later, a grove of oak trees sheltered a dairy barn and encroached on a typical West Virginia sinkhole. In the springtime lilacs bloomed on a small hillside next to the GMS Activities Building and garage. THE EARLY YEARS 1875-1921 In 1875, when the succeeding Lewisburg Academy trustees put all the original assets of Dr. McElhenney’s “Old Brick Academy” into the Lewisburg Female Institute, the boys were set adrift. It is probable that Dr. Mathew Lyle Lacy, Dr. McElhenney’s successor who became president of the Female Institute in 1882, reestablished the boys’ charter, but still there is no record of a boys’ school until the Gilmore Academy fifteen years later. Perhaps, as Dr. John F. Montgomery (1991) suggests, the fashion of the day pushed for separate education for girls and boys. Perhaps, after the widespread slaughter of young men during the Civil War (Chambers), the trustees saw the wisdom of educating girls. For whatever reasons, the boys suffered a break in the strong educational tradition of the Presbyterian Church and Greenbrier County. Their schooling proceeded in some combination of private teachers and public school, such as the Lewisburg Graded School, until Thomas H. Gilmore of Washington and Lee University started the Greenbrier Male Academy in 1890. A Succession of Male Schools Leading to GMS The years from 1875 until the Greenbrier Military School came to fruition saw various male schools, many on the site of GMS. Often the schools changed names, whether official or not, to reflect the leadership and purpose of the school. Greenbrier Male Academy or Gilmore Academy 1890-92. In 1890 Thomas Gilmore purchased property (by promissory note) of slightly more than three acres from Sarah Spotts at 412 East Washington St., at the corner of what is now Dwyer Lane, The first year of attendance at Mr. Gilmore’s