Russell Road

St. Stephen’s School began life as one house. In 1944 — immediately after the federal government’s wartime population influx had filled Alexandria’s existing schools to overflowing — the Reverend The Rev. Edward Tate Person The Rev. Edward Tate Episcopal priest who founded St. Stephen's School for Boys at a single residence on Russell Road in Alexandria in 1944. The school was admitted that same year to the Church Schools … opened a small Episcopal school for boys in a single residence on Russell Road, in what is now the Rosemont neighborhood ^[1] Source 1 SSSAS School History Website ^[2] Source 2 Episcopal Diocese of Virginia: Church Schools Celebrate 100 Years Article .

Ninety-seven students enrolled the first year, in grades 3 through 8. The school was admitted to the Church Schools of the Diocese of Virginia (CSDV) in the same year — under a special CSDV trustees' vote — making it institutionally a sister to 1200 North Quaker Lane Place 1200 North Quaker Lane The first high school in Virginia, founded 1839 by Bishop William Meade of the Episcopal Diocese on a 100-acre campus west of Old Town. First principal William Nelson Pendleton … and to St. Agnes, which had been a CSDV school since 1924.

The school’s first three graduates — George Ford, Gene Golien, and Howard Whellan — finished in June 1950, and the school continued to expand on the Russell Road site through the early 1950s. By the middle of the decade the rented house had been thoroughly outgrown. In January 1957 St. Stephen’s relocated to a purpose-acquired wooded campus a mile and a half to the west, the address of today’s 1000 Saint Stephens Road Place 1000 Saint Stephens Road Upper School (grades 9–12) of St. Stephen's & St. Agnes School, occupying the Saint Stephens Road campus opened in January 1957 by St. Stephen's School for Boys. In 1961 the school … .

The exact Russell Road address is not preserved in the school’s publicly available records (this entry is positioned on the block most consistent with diocesan correspondence). The house has long since reverted to private use; it is no longer an institutional address. The name “St. Stephens” persists in Alexandria, however — on the road that runs to the modern Upper School, on the school crest, and in the Episcopal calendar that gave the school its feast day.