This was the original campus of Randolph-Macon College, the oldest Methodist-affiliated college still operating in the United States. Chartered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1830 and named for Congressmen John Randolph of Roanoke, Charlotte County, Virginia, and Nathaniel Macon of Warren County, North Carolina, the college opened on 9 October 1832. Dabney Cosby, a builder employed by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia, was a contractor. In 1868, largely because of economic difficulties caused by the Civil War, the college moved to Ashland, where it continues in operation. The vacated buildings later housed a freedmen's school and the Boydton Academic and Bible Institute, which operated until the mid-1930s.