Blackstone College for Girls

Blackstone College for Girls was a private, religious school for young women in Blackstone, Nottoway County, in the U.S. state of Virginia. The school operated under the auspices of the Virginia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South between 1894 and 1950. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources acknowledged the significance of the site by erecting historical marker number K 174 in 1996. Blackstone College is also designated as a site on the Civil Rights in Education Heritage Trail. The school buildings still stand. Since 1955, the Virginia United Methodist Church has used the former school buildings as a conference center.
The Blackstone Female Institute received its charter from the Virginia state legislature on February 15, 1892. The institute's facilities were built on six acres of land donated by the Blackstone Land Company. BFI opened its doors to students in September 1894, and 71 students enrolled for the first term. After the successful completion of the first academic year, Blackstone Female Institute was recognized by the Randolph-Macon System as a feeder school for Randolph-Macon Woman's College, which had been established in 1891 in Lynchburg. A college component was added to Blackstone Female Institute for the beginning of the 1915–1916 school year, and the name began to transition to Blackstone College for Girls , with the "college" name becoming firmly entrenched in the early 1920s. The 1916 & 1917 editions of the Cannon Ball, the campus yearbook, referred to the school as Blackstone College, and the 1918 Cannon Ball referred to it as Blackstone College for Girls.

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