While school officials decided how the Ads, Postcards, and Catalogs would look, the cadets themselves, with faculty supervision, assembled and published the yearbook and the cadet newspaper. The yearbook showed the school from the eyes of the cadet staff and gave in its pages what was important to the cadets in their time at the Academy.
The cadets published the first yearbook in 1906 and production continued each year through 1975. There was no yearbook published for the final session in Staunton, 1976, nor was one published for 1977-1978 school session held in Hampton, VA.
Presented below are the 70 yearbooks that were published by the cadets. To view a yearbook, click on one of the years below. The yearbook will open in a separate tab. Several of these files are large (>20MB) and, depending on your download speeds, may take awhile to download.
Special Note
The SMA History Project has collected 52 of the 70 published SMA yearbooks over the years. The final plan for them is to be donated to the Library of Virginia so that the history of the school will be in three places including the SMA Museum and the SMA History website.
The Library Of Virginia currently has 7 SMA yearbooks but, due to duplication, this donation will only bring the total number of SMA yearbooks in the Library to 54. The missing ones will be 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1914, 1915, 1936, 1948, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, and 1971.
The project would like to ask anyone that might have a copy of any of these to consider donating them to the Library Of Virginia. If you do feel you could donate one (or many) of these, please contact John Metz, Deputy of Collections and Programs at 804-692-3607 or email him at john.metz@lva.virginia.gov. If you do donate one (or many), please let me know (gregory@smahistory.com) so that I can update my list.
Also, don’t just stick to the ones missing. As a historian, I feel it’s better to leave multiple copies in a place where they’ll be protected than to have the final cleaning crew throw them in the dumpster.
Alternatively, you can send them to me and I will bundle them up with the Project’s though I would rather them go straight to the Library.
Thanks,
Gregory Robertson, SMA’70
Note: You must have adobe reader installed on your computer to view these documents. If you need to download adobe reader, click here. The Adobe Reader download page will open in a separate tab.