Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s Grave

This photograph, published in Francis Greenwood Peabody's Founder's Day at Hampton: An Address in Memory of Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1898), shows Samuel Chapman Armstrong's grave in the student cemetery at the Hampton Normal and Agicultural Institute. The gravesite features a headstone of volcanic rock from Hawaii, where Armstrong was born, and a block of granite from the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where Armstrong attended college. In an address at Hampton honoring the memory of Armstrong, who founded the school, Peabody noted that Armstrong was "volcanic in his temperament, granitic in his character, and between the two [he possessed] many a flower of imagination and childlikeness and joy …" Peabody was a minister and a professor of theology  at Harvard.

The school's chapel, with its 150-foot clock tower, and other academic buildings are visible in the distance.

Citation: Founder's Day at Hampton: An Address in Memory of Samuel Chapman Armstrong. LC2851 .H32 P6 1898. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.