Christiansburg Institute was a school for African Americans from 1866 until 1966 in Montgomery County, Virginia. The school was founded after the Civil War by Captain , a Union soldier and Baptist minister from Philadelphia. It was established to educate freed slaves. It closed in the wake of desegregation and is now a museum. After the war, Schaeffer joined the Freedmen's Bureau agency and came to Christiansburg in 1866 with the mission to educate newly freed slaves and prepare them for freedom. The school started in a rented one-room house with only twelve students.