Peace College
Raleigh, Wake County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Peace College. Founded by Presbyterian elder Wm. Peace 1857 as school for women; opened 1872. Main building used as Confederate hospital & by Freedmen's Bureau.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
Founded in 1857 by Presbyterian elder William Peace as a school for women, the college's opening was delayed by the Civil War, during which its main building served as a Confederate hospital and later housed the Freedmen's Bureau. Classes finally began in 1872. Its early history reflects the upheaval and reordering of the wartime and Reconstruction South.
Why it matters
Institutions like Peace advanced women's education in an era when it was still contested, while their wartime service ties them directly to the story of emancipation and Reconstruction.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The middle decades of the nineteenth century were a contested time for women's education in America. Many still argued that higher learning was neither necessary nor proper for women. Against that view, churches and civic-minded citizens began founding schools meant to give young women a serious education, and the plan for this college in Raleigh, set in motion in 1857, belonged to that hopeful movement.
Then the ground shifted. The Civil War swept over the South, and buildings meant for classrooms were pressed into the service of armies and, later, of a nation trying to rebuild. Raleigh, as North Carolina's capital, sat squarely in the path of these upheavals, and this institution's own walls were drawn into them.
So the site holds two eras at once: the antebellum ambition to educate women, and the wartime and Reconstruction storm that delayed that ambition and briefly turned the building to entirely different uses.
People & events
The founding impulse came from William Peace, a Presbyterian elder whose gift set the school in motion in 1857. In ordinary times, classes might have followed within a few years. These were not ordinary times.
Before the school could truly open, its main building served as a Confederate hospital, caring for the wounded and sick of the Southern armies. When the war ended, the same building took on a very different role: it housed the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency created in 1865 to aid formerly enslaved people and war refugees as they built new lives in freedom.
Only in 1872, with the war behind it and Reconstruction underway, did the college finally open its doors to students as its founder had intended. Few institutions carry, in the story of a single structure, so complete an arc from antebellum plan to wartime suffering to the labor of emancipation and rebuilding.
Its place in the American story
This one building's history maps neatly onto the largest American story of its century. A place first imagined to advance women's education — a cause still fighting for acceptance — became in turn a hospital of a nation at war with itself, and then a station of the effort to secure freedom for millions newly emancipated.
The Freedmen's Bureau's presence is especially telling. That agency represented an extraordinary national experiment: a federal commitment, however incomplete and short-lived, to help formerly enslaved people secure schooling, contracts, and a foothold in free society. That such work was carried out within these walls ties a Raleigh campus directly to the central drama of Reconstruction.
And when the college at last opened, it added its own thread to a long national advance — the slow, uneven, but ultimately transforming expansion of education for American women.
If you visit
Look first at the main building, and let the marker reframe what you're seeing. The same rooms that would fill with students once held wounded soldiers, and later the desks of an agency working on behalf of the newly free. Few facades ask you to hold so many chapters in mind at once.
The campus sits within easy reach of Raleigh's historic core, which makes it a natural stop on a walking route through the capital's past. Notice how a place devoted to learning was, for a few wrenching years, conscripted by the emergencies around it.
If you travel with young people, this is a good spot to talk about how history is rarely tidy — how a single building can begin as one thing, be forced to become another, and finally grow into what it was always meant to be.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · William Peace
Related events
- · Use as Confederate hospital
- · Use by the Freedmen's Bureau
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Anna J. Cooper
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In 1908 Anna Easter Brown helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority established by and for African American women, born at Howard University as Black students built their own institutions of leadership and service. A history teacher by profession, Brown embodied the era's belief that education and organization were paths to uplift. Her grave lies a quarter mile east.
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