Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 20, 1993 TAG: 9303200330
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: FORT DEFIANCE LENGTH: Long
OUT-OF-COMMISSION SCHOOL GETS A CHANCE
Chester Cole can't stand the undisciplined look of Augusta Military Academy.Fallen ceiling plaster lies in the empty barracks and everyone jokes about "Fluffy" the guard cat, a partially dissected cat preserved in the abandoned school's laboratory.
So Cole, a history teacher, meticulously restored his former classroom, down to the graded test papers on the desk. It looks just like it did on the January day in 1984 when the historic school closed without warning.
Cole's classroom restoration is his way of helping an Arlington couple bring Augusta Military Academy back to life.
Harold Moore said he couldn't stand to see the school decay a little bit more each time he drove past to visit friends who live nearby.
Moore, who graduated from a military prep school in Georgia and attended The Citadel in South Carolina, has no direct ties to Augusta Military.
But Moore, an on-board services manager for Amtrak, said he and his wife have spent all their savings and spare time raising money to purchase and ultimately reopen one of Virginia's oldest military prep schools.
"I would hate to see it turned into condos or go by way of the wrecking ball," Judith Moore said. "There's too much history here."
The Augusta Male Academy was founded in Fort Defiance 33 years before the Revolutionary War. The buildings were burned during the Civil War.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, professor Charles Roller, a cavalry officer in Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's First Virginia Cavalry, returned to Fort Defiance to open a school on the original site for sons of Confederate veterans.
In 1890 the nonsectarian school's name was changed from Augusta Academy to Augusta Military Academy and it became a full-time boarding school for boys. The main barracks built in 1915 mimicked the fortress-like design of Virginia Military Institute.
Enrollment rose to 700 after World War II, when there were about 300 military prep schools in the United States, and dropped below 100 in the post-Vietnam years and to 75 when it finally closed.
There are now 32 military prep schools, seven of which are in Virginia: The Miller School of Albemarle and Fishburne in Waynesboro, established in the 1870s; Randolph-Macon in Front Royal; Fork Union in Fork Union; and Massanutten in Woodstock, founded in the 1890s; Hargrave in Chatham, 1909; and Benedictine in Richmond, 1911.
Enrollments at the military academies are on the rise and Randolph-Macon, a coed school that almost closed in 1980 because of low enrollments, plans to expand.
"I started doing research on the feasibility of reopening the school," Judith Moore said, "and I found the military academies are doing quite well."
The Moores won't say how much they are paying for the academy, which went on the market last summer for $2 million, and the contract closing date hasn't been set.
She estimated it will take $10 million to $30 million to historically renovate and open the school by 1995. The Fort Defiance Foundation is trying to raise $38 million for an endowment that would ensure the school would never close again, said the development director, Scott Barden.
Cole said people in the Shenandoah Valley are skeptical of the Moores' chances, which he said is understandable because they've witnessed "so many false starts."
"One guy wanted to start the World Health Center at the academy," Cole said. "One fellow wanted to open a religious college that would have amounted to a cultist kind of thing and the regular churches renounced it."
The current owner, a Gulfport, Miss., man, wanted to reopen the school as a military academy but was unable to obtain financing, Cole said.
Cole said the Moores have gone further than the others, with the crown prince of the former Egyptian monarchy providing "the first big breakthrough."
Prince Osman R. Ibrahim, chairman of a nonprofit foundation that runs five orphanages in Egypt, said he is committed to raising money for scholarships and helping the Moores obtain financing.
Ibrahim said after a recent tour of the school that there will be a fund-raising event April 16 in Washington, with proceeds going toward scholarships that would be used by Egyptian orphans to attend AMA.
Judith Moore, a financial consultant, said many alumni also have pledged money and "parents are already trying to enroll their children here."
"People are looking to place their children in an environment where they are safe and where they are taught honor and discipline," she said.
AMA closed soon after the power was cut off because of a lack of money to pay a $1,600 electric bill.
It was two days before the cadets were due back after Christmas break, Cole said. He was helping another teacher and the admission's director put letters in envelopes to inform 2,500 alumni that AMA was getting a $1 million gift. The headmaster stuck his head in the door and said forget the letter, the school board had just decided to close the school immediately.
"Within two hours this school died," Cole said.
Just about everything but the desks Cole put back in his classroom, kitchen equipment, chalkboards and "Fluffy" was carted off after an auction. "This place needs to be a living monument and not some pile of stone," Cole said.