Founded by Confederate veteran and state delegate Charles Summerville Roller in 1879, Augusta Military Academy, until it closed in 1984, was the oldest military preparatory school in the Commonwealth. The school’s dominant architectural feature is the stuccoed Main Barracks, designed by T. J. Collins and Sons of Staunton in a battlemented Gothic style. Completed in 1915, the prototype was Alexander Jackson Davis’s Barracks at the Virginia Military Institute. In the wake of World War I and Gen. John J. Pershing’s report to Congress in 1920 recommending the early military training of American youth, the Augusta Military Academy formed the nation’s first Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps and later achieved an international reputation for excellence in the field of secondary-level military education.