1200
North Quaker Lane

Episcopal High School opened in October 1839 on a 100-acre tract on the western edge of Alexandria, four miles up the King Street pike from the river. Its founding act of imagination belongs to William Meade Person William Meade b. 1789 · d. 1862 Second Bishop of Virginia (consecrated 1841; assistant bishop 1829–1841) and the founder of Episcopal High School in Alexandria in 1839 — the first high school in Virginia. A … , the second Bishop of Virginia, who had argued for years that the rapidly-thinning Episcopal Church in the upland South needed a school of its own — a place where the sons of Virginia families could be educated together in the classical curriculum and the spiritual life of the church ^[1] Source 1 Episcopal High School — Since 1839 Website .

The school’s first principal was William Nelson Pendleton Person William Nelson Pendleton b. 1809 · d. 1883 West Point–trained Episcopal priest who served as the first principal of Episcopal High School in Alexandria from its 1839 opening through 1844, then later as Robert E. Lee's chief … , a West Point–trained Episcopal priest who would later command the artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia. Pendleton and three assistant masters opened with 35 boys boarding in Hoxton House — the 1806 home of Eliza Parke Custis, George Washington’s step-granddaughter, which the diocese had acquired with the surrounding farm. Enrollment more than tripled to 101 in the second year, and a three-story brick “Schoolhouse” rose alongside Hoxton in 1840 ^[1] Source 1 Episcopal High School — Since 1839 Website ^[2] Source 2 The Zebra: Marking History — Episcopal High School (2015) Article .

Federal occupation, 1861–1865

Episcopal sat directly behind the Defenses of Washington’s outer ring — Fort Worth was on the next hill — and the campus was occupied by Union troops within weeks of the Marshall House killing of Col. Ellsworth in May 1861. The masters and most of the older boys went south; some fought under their former principal at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Appomattox. The buildings served variously as a hospital, a barracks, and a stable. The school did not reopen until October 1866 ^[3] Source 3 Wikipedia, Episcopal High School (Alexandria, Virginia) Website .

“The High School”

For the century after Reconstruction, Episcopal was simply called “the High School” within the Diocese of Virginia and across the Episcopal South — there was, for the period that mattered, only the one. It remained boys-only and boarding-only until 1991, when it admitted its first female students; today it is co-educational, ~440 students, all boarding (one of only fourteen all-boarding schools in the United States as of 2026). The campus is anchored by Hoxton House on the south and a Collegiate Gothic chapel on the north, with academic buildings, a library, and athletic fields filling the original 100 acres.

Alumni and legacies

Documented alumni include U.S. Senator and 2008 presidential nominee John S. McCain III (‘54); Secretary of State and of the Treasury James A. Baker III (‘48); Watergate-era Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox; and the writer Walker Percy (‘33). The Confederate-veteran chapter of the school’s first century is documented by the names cut into the war memorial in the chapel narthex.