The University of Alabama opened in 1831 with a campus of seven buildings, including the Rotunda, two dormitories, two faculty houses, the laboratory, and a hotel that later became known as the Gorgas House. The Rotunda, destroyed in a fire during the Civil War, housed the university library and was patterned after Thomas Jefferson's designs for the University of Virginia.
University of Alabama Rotunda, 1859
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Courtesy of the University of Alabama W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library
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