On a clear afternoon, as you drive west out of Charlottesville, you’ll notice that the road tilts slightly upward, with the Blue Ridge slipping behind you and the long shoulders of Massanutten Mountain rising in the distance. Almost without warning, Harrisonburg and the bluestone walls of James Madison University appear somewhere along the route. For a school that has grown from a two-hundred-student women’s teacher college to a public research university with over twenty thousand students enrolled in just one lifetime, this arrival is strangely understated.
The State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg was the school’s original name when it opened in 1908. The name is so full of meaning that it almost sounds like a Victorian sentence. During the first few years, six buildings were constructed. In 1911, the first twenty graduates were awarded diplomas. Twenty women wearing long skirts and high collars leave a small Virginia campus with credentials that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, and there’s something subtly poignant about that number. Even as the surrounding campus underwent unrecognizable change, the university continued to tell that story to itself.
The first significant change in ambition occurred in 1938 when Madison College was renamed in honor of the fourth president, whose Montpelier estate is located nearby in Orange. Then came the men, who were fully coeducated by 1966 after being admitted as regular day students in 1946. The school had changed significantly since its founding by the time Ronald Carrier assumed the presidency in 1971, and Carrier—whose name still looms over the main library—seemed committed to seeing it through. The building boom continued after JMU was adopted as the official name in 1977.
The peculiar thing about JMU is how quickly it has expanded without completely losing its small-college vibe. After paying more than $40 million for the former Rockingham Memorial Hospital site in 2005, the university absorbed the former Harrisonburg High School building across South High Street. Locals took notice. According to a 2006 report from the local ABC affiliate, tensions between the university and the city have erupted multiple times, and the campus has almost doubled in twenty years. Walking through Harrisonburg’s downtown gives the impression that the town is still figuring out where it ends and the university begins.
Slow looking is rewarded on campus itself. Wilson Hall serves as the focal point of the Bluestone quad, which is constructed from the same limestone that was extracted from the nearby valley. This limestone gives the older buildings a gentle, slightly bruised hue that looks incredibly good in photos. According to reports, the university is now the second most photographed location in Virginia on Instagram. This is a minor detail that, once you’ve stood there at dusk, seems both absurd and completely plausible. Something different was indicated by the Forbes Center for the Performing Arts, an eighty-two million dollar complex that opened across South Main in 2010. Perhaps ambition. Or the subdued assurance of a school that has stopped making excuses for itself.
Not everything has gone without a hitch. Both the 2021 controversy over an orientation training video that sparked criticism from conservative commentators and some alumni, as well as the 2010 off-campus block party that attracted eight thousand people and ended with riot gear, are still remembered by the institution. Completed in 2021, the renaming of three quad halls that had previously been devoted to Confederate figures was a form of public reconciliation. Gabbin Hall replaced Mountain Hall. Justice Studies Hall was renamed Darcus Johnson Hall in honor of JMU’s first Black graduate.
James C. Schmidt was named the seventh president by the Board of Visitors in March 2025, and he will assume office in July. It’s still unclear what course he will take, whether the building boom will continue or eventually stop, and whether Harrisonburg’s relationship will improve or worsen. However, from a distance, it’s difficult to ignore how much of it has already been absorbed and how little of it is visible on those serene bluestone walls.
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