McGuire’s University School opened on what is now Idlewood Avenue in 1914. (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
Before the Jewish Community Center became an institution in Richmond, it shared a home with two lesser-known schools on what would eventually become Idlewood Avenue.
The history dates to 1914, when McGuire’s University School, a venerated private preparatory institution for boys founded by John Peyton McGuire Jr. in 1865, moved into a purpose-built, two-story brick structure above a basement, flanked by one-story wings with parapets at 2912 Beverly Street. The school and the balconies of nearby apartments faced the expanse of Byrd Park and its various sports fields.
Soon after, Beverly Street was renamed Idlewood Avenue.
Architect and consulting engineer Cary Sheppard, son of the renowned artist and illustrator William Ludwell and Sallie H. McCaw Sheppard, drew the plans realized by the prolific John T. Wilson Construction Co. Among Wilson’s works are Temple Beth Ahabah, Richmond Community Hospital, The Jefferson Hotel and the recently rescued Second Baptist Church. Sheppard, although well-connected, didn’t attend McGuire’s.
A 1914 McGuire’s advertisement extolled the “New School house of Brick and Concrete/Modern In Every Detail … in a large lot of its own, with southern exposure, in easy walking distance of the western residence section, convenient to the street cars, and only 15 minutes from Fifth and Main Streets. For school purposes our building and location is unexcelled in the South!”
A certificate from McGuire’s assured entry “without examination” into the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the universities of North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Students in class at McGuire’s University School (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
The school’s curriculum included model methods of teaching math, particularly algebra, along with Latin, Greek and other foreign languages, and emphasized public speaking. Enrollment ranged from 175 to 200 boys and, this being Richmond, the school was for whites only.
Beyond its rigorous curriculum, McGuire’s also fielded football, track and baseball teams, and established rivals included Benedictine College.
At McGuire’s commencement events, students received academic and athletic achievement awards and scholarships. Among these was the Jack Gordon Memorial Scholarship, established in 1907 to honor 19-year-old student John W. Gordon Jr. for attempting to rescue a young Rose M. Satterfield from drowning in the James River. Both perished.
In the early 1900s, McGuire’s University fielded a dominant baseball team. (Photo courtesy Virginia Museum of History & Culture)
After McGuire’s death in 1904, his son, McGuire III, advanced from teacher to principal. He came into the world a year after his father began teaching at the school, matriculated at McGuire’s and then went to UVA. He practiced as a civil engineer until 1894, when he joined the school’s faculty.
At the conclusion of the 77th commencement of 1942, Principal McGuire made the unexpected announcement of the school’s closure.
That November, the school became the headquarters and barracks for 150 military police, who guarded Richmond’s public buildings and facilities. The soldiers moved there from the tents of Camp Ambler at the southern end of the Lee Bridge. (The youngest son of the five children Principal McGuire had with his second wife, Virginia Baylor Armistead, died in action on the Italian front in December 1943.)
In October 1945, the Rimmon Lodge 68 of B’nai B’rith leased the former McGuire’s from H. J. Bernstein, president of the Bernie Corp. They immediately conducted a fundraising campaign to provide equipment and make improvements to the building, which would become the Richmond Jewish Community Center. The approximately $30,000 remodeling included the cost of a stage in the gymnasium wing.
The JCC enrolled 300 members. Membership would grow to include a variety of individuals and groups. The center included a library, a basement recreation room for youth and a memorial plaque for Richmond’s Jewish World War II dead.
Then, a fire destroyed nearly everything. In the early morning hours of Feb. 3, 1948, a blaze ignited in the basement beneath the stage at the far east end of the gymnasium.
McGuire’s University building on Idlewood Avenue was almost completely destroyed by fire in 1948. (Photo courtesy Weinstein Jewish Community Center)
The dispersed JCC purchased the Holy Comforter Church property at 2100 Grove Avenue. In 1959, the JCC opened at its present location on Monument Avenue.
Fan Square Apartments, now condos, supplanted the church.
The McGuire/JCC site, apparently vacant since the 1948 fire, became home to the Richmond Business College in June 1958 and was designated as 2908 Idlewood Avenue. A white-painted brick modernistic building with a raised corner displayed the school’s initials. The $40,000 structure included four classrooms to accommodate 150 students and an adjacent 30 parking spaces.
The school’s founder, Charles Woodford Mylius, told the News Leader that he salvaged a marble tablet incised with “Fides Intacta” (“Unsullied Honor”) from the McGuire/JCC ruins and had it placed in the RBC.
Mylius, a World War I Marine veteran from Morgantown, West Virginia, and a former teacher at Fork Union Military Academy and John Marshall High School, had first opened the RBC in 1922. He soon partnered with New Brunswick, Canada, native and handwriting expert George Ludlow White Sr. as secretary-treasurer. Mylius’ son, William, served in the Navy during World War II and first clerked at the school, although he later became vice president.
RBC’s students were men and women honing their professional skills of shorthand, typing, court reporting and accounting during day and night classes.
By the 1960s, though, student enrollments dwindled due to competition from the Richmond branch of the merged Smithdeal-Massey Business College, along with other community and junior colleges.
Following Mylius’ 1968 death, longtime partner George White rented out the former RBC for office spaces. The tenants were nonprofits such as the Virginia Council on Social Welfare and the Richmond Area Speleological Society, as well as a classroom for the Richmond Montessori School.
A 1977 purchase of the RBC by a North Carolina education chain, led by entrepreneur George Shinn (later owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Hornets), took the school to the former First & Merchants National Bank on the corner of Broad and Lombardy, where it operated until 1981. Today it’s a Verizon store and apartments. The RBC’s prior home became a private residence around 1993.
An intriguing element remains of this history. Sitting near the hedged front is an unusual stone bench that resembles a window lintel from the McGuire’s building. Next to it is a high pole affixed by a lamp, which could’ve once held a flag or served as a light for night students who sought their futures in the professional world.
