Lacy, Drury

(b. 1802 d. 1884) Reverend Drury Lacy was fifty-three years old when he was elected president of Davidson College in 1855. He had graduated from Hampden-Sydney College and Union Theological Seminary and had been the minister of several churches in New Bern and Raleigh, North Carolina. In his first year as president, he experienced a student revolt, during which most of the students left the college. That year’s commencement had only three graduates. Fortunately, during Lacy’s administration, the college received a bequest from North Carolina businessman Maxwell Chambers. With this bequest, Davidson suddenly became the richest college south of Princeton and in response, the college constructed Chambers Building, the largest and finest collegiate building in the southern states at the time. Alexander Jackson Davis, a notable architect from New York, was asked to design the original plans for the building.

In 1860 Lacy left Davidson to continue ministerial work and served as chaplain in the Forty-seventh Regiment, C.S.A. After the Civil War, he returned to Raleigh, North Carolina, where he and his wife, Mary Ritchie Rice Lacy, operated a female school, the Peace Institute. This school eventually became the present Peace College.

Works Cited

Robert Hall Morrison, Samuel Williamson, Drury Lacy, John Lycan Kirkpatrick, George Wilson McPhail, John Rennie Blake, Andrew Dousa Hepburn, Luther McKinnon, John Bunyan Shearer, Henry Louis Smith, William Joseph Martin, Jr., Walter Lee Lingle, John Rood Cunningham, David Grier Martin, Samuel Reid Spencer, Jr., John Wells Kuykendall, Robert Fredrick Vagt, Thomas Warren Ross, Sr.

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Author: Molly P. Gillespie & Mark Grotjohn
Date: 1998 & 29 June 2006

Cite as: Gillespie, Molly P. and Mark Grotjohn. “Drury Lacy ” Davidson Encyclopedia, 29 June 2006. https://digitalprojects.davidson.edu/omeka/s/college-archives-davidson-encyclopedia/page/lacy-drury