"Washington and Lee University’s back campus is dominated by “The Ruins,” the stone walls of Liberty Hall Academy’s academic and dormitory building. This iconic structure, however, was just one of many in the vicinity. The campus also included a rector’s house, steward’s house, stable, and other features that W&L Archaeology has excavated. Not only was the main academy building integral to a web of structures, but it was also short lived. It stood just for a decade (1793-1803) before it burned and the school moved to its current location. From 1803 until the Civil War, the former Liberty Hall campus was a plantation belonging to Andrew Alexander. Thus for some six decades, it was a landscape inhabited and worked by members of an enslaved labor force. Thousands of artifacts recovered around the “steward’s house” and other structures post-date the academy period and therefore were used, not by Liberty Hall students, but by enslaved people in the Alexander estate. Archaeology, archival sources and memoirs have begun to illuminate their experiences, among the most poignant being indications that enslaved people living in former Academy buildings taught each other to read." (Key Points section from the resource)