Wilson Female Academy, one of Wilson's earliest school buildings, also served as a Confederate hospital during the war, and its surviving section is the only known remnant of that complex. Wilson's position on the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, the principal north-south line linked to Virginia at Weldon by the Petersburg Railroad, made the town a good hospital site after the war began. On April 1, 1862, Confederate authorities seized the building for use as a general military hospital, where Dr. Solomon S. Satchwell, the surgeon in charge, converted forty classrooms and other rooms into wards and treated hundreds of patients. The frame two-story building had a two-hundred-foot-long facade, a large one-story rear addition, and dozens of large windows needed for summer ventilation. Soldiers who died there of wounds or disease were buried near the academy grounds, then reinterred in 1894 under a burial mound in Maplewood Cemetery, where a Confederate monument was dedicated on May 10, 1902. Designed in the Italianate style by British-born architect Edmund G. Lind, who emigrated to New York in 1855 and later practiced in Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia, the school building was completed in 1859 about two blocks south of here. After the war, the former academy and hospital became Wilson Collegiate Institute from 1872 until its closing in 1898, after which the building was divided into housing units, and this section from the rear addition was moved here and rehabilitated in 2005.