It’s been a long walk. Add, as his friends call him, yearns to take off his backpack and relax. Like most, he wants to enjoy all Blacksburg offers to new students, but this is a journey that started in 1872.
Add climbs the stairs to the Upper Quad and remains there, forever frozen in time. “Walking Toward the Light,” a bronze sculpture by artist Lawrence Bechtel ’85, depicts William Addison Caldwell, the first student to enroll in the new Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, now Virginia Tech.
Caldwell, 16, arrived in Blacksburg with his brother, Milton, after walking a legendary 26 miles from Sinking Creek in Craig County, Virginia. Bechtel’s sculpture captures Caldwell in full stride, all curly haired and hat bedecked, holding a walking stick in one hand and a Bible in the other and wearing the equivalent of today’s backpack — a haversack.
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