Rugby Road - Carr's Hill

Carr's Hill

Carr's Hill sits at the corner of Rugby Road and University Avenue, facing Mad Bowl to the southeast and the Rotunda to the southwest. The site has long been important to the extended university community. As the enrollment at the University overflowed the original Jeffersonian rooms of the Academical Village, Sidney Carr's boardinghouse on Carr's Hill helped absorb the additional students starting in the mid-1840s. By 1877 Carr's Hill hosted dormitories, at which the University's first experiment in dining clubs took place.

In the years of the Civil War, Carr's Hill served as a drill field and as a site for the Confederate flag, which briefly flew above the Rotunda itself.

The University purchased the Carr's Hill property outright in June 1867 for $10,000, and over time it became the site of two significant University buildings: Fayerweather Hall and the President's residence. Fayerweather Hall, built in 1893, was the University's first dedicated indoor gymnasium, and is currently the site of the University of Virginia's Art History department. The President's House was constructed on Carr's Hill, which had to be terraced for the purpose. Construction began in 1907, two years after the inauguration of the first president of the University, Edwin Alderman, and finished in 1909. The house was designed by McKim, Mead, and White, the team of architects responsible for the buildings on the South Lawn (Rouss, Cocke, and Old Cabell Hall) and the rebuilding of the Rotunda.