Western Reserve Academy

Western Reserve Academy (WRA), or simply Reserve, is a private, midsized, coeducational boarding and day college preparatory school located in Hudson, Ohio, United States. A boarding school, Western Reserve Academy is largely a residential campus, with 280 of 390 students living on campus and the remainder attending as day students. Students from over 20 states and 15 countries attend. History Western Reserve Academy was established on February 7, 1826, as the Western Reserve College and Preparatory School in Hudson, Ohio, on a plot of land set aside by charter by the Ohio legislature. Reserve is the 27th oldest preparatory boarding school in the United States, and the oldest outside of the Northeast. The institution's name comes from the area in which it was built, the Connecticut Western Reserve, as it was the first of its kind in Northern Ohio. The settlers from Connecticut wanted to build a school of the same caliber as Yale College. They selected the same architectural design, with brick buildings and the same motto, Lux et Veritas. People called it "the Yale of the West." The first cohort included eleven students at the college level and eight at the preparatory level. In 1882, the college section moved north to Cleveland and became Western Reserve University, later merging with the Case Institute of Technology to become Case Western Reserve University. Western Reserve Academy remained open for another twenty-one years until 1903, when it closed due to financial problems.