The campus was founded on the grounds of “Little Scotland”, a former plantation in Elizabeth City County that is located on the river. It overlooked Hampton Roads and was not far from Fortress Monroe and the Grand Contraband Camp that gathered nearby. Formerly enslaved men and women sought refuge with Union forces in the South during the first year of the war. Their facilities represented freedom. In 1861 the American Missionary Association (AMA) responded to the former slaves’ need for education and hired Mary Smith Peake as its first teacher at the camp. She had already secretly been teaching slaves and free blacks in the area despite the state’s legal prohibition. She first taught for the AMA on September 17, 1861, and was said to gather her pupils under a large oak. In 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation was read here  And that oak tree became the Emancipation Oak. In 1863, the black community gathered under the oak to hear the first Southern reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, leading to its nickname as the Emancipation Oak. The Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, later called the Hampton Institute, was founded in 1868 after the war by the biracial leadership of the American Missionary Association, who were chiefly Congregational and Presbyterian ministers. It was first led by former Union General Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Among the school’s famous alumni is Dr. Booker T. Washington, an educator who was hired as the first principal at the Tuskegee Institute, which he developed for decades.

The Trade School Era

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Hampton Normal School saw a dramatic increase in enrollment and educational offerings, which created a need not only for additional dormitory space, but also for auxiliary facilities. A number of buildings were constructed during this twenty-year span, including Whipple Barn, Wigwam (the American Indian boy’s dormitory), Holly Tree Inn, and the Armstrong-Slater Trade School, most all of them built by Hampton students.

The new trade school would offer instruction in farming, carpentry, harness making, printing, tailoring, locksmithing, blacksmithing, painting, and wheelwrighting. By 1904, nearly three-fourths of all boys at Hampton were taking trades classes. In addition to expansion of the agricultural program in 1913,