The Lawn toward Cabell Hall, Charlottesville, VA, circa 1907

About this postcard

A long, tree-lined lawn stretches between rows of brick pavilions and dormitory rooms toward a large classical building with a columned portico at the far end. The view looks from the Rotunda toward Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia. The Lawn was the heart of Thomas Jefferson's design for the university, an "academical village" of professors' pavilions and student rooms facing a central green. Cabell Hall, designed by Stanford White, closed the south end of the Lawn when it was completed in 1898, three years after fire gutted Jefferson's Rotunda. White rebuilt the Rotunda as well. In the early 1900s the university remained small, and the Lawn was the center of its daily life.