Smith Academy (1856)

A three-story brick block with a rusticated stone base, standing flush to Washington Avenue behind a full-width iron fence. The façade is symmetrical and flat, its ranks of tall rectangular windows capped by stone lintels beneath a bracketed cornice. A single central doorway is sheltered by a small columned porch reached by a short flight of steps. The plain, balanced front reflects the restrained institutional manner of mid-19th-century St. Louis.

Washington University established an academic department in 1856 to prepare boys for the university; it was named Smith Academy in 1879, after one of its principal benefactors. The academy occupied the university's original downtown campus along Washington Avenue, where the first building, Academic Hall, had opened at Seventeenth Street in 1856. When Washington University moved west to its new campus beside Forest Park in 1905, Smith Academy left downtown for a new building on Enright Avenue, and the academy closed for good in 1917. The downtown campus buildings were demolished after the university's departure.