Riverside History

Riverside was chartered  August 23, 1906, by Brenau College professors A.W. Van Hoose and H.J. Pearce. In 1907, they purchased 25 acres of land on the west side of Riverside Drive, which was then two miles north of Gainesville and half a mile from the Chattahoochee River.

Construction on the academy began in 1907 with plans to open the school that fall. However, due to construction delays, the school did not open until September 1908.
In 1913, Pearce and Van Hoose hired Sandy Beaver to be Riverside's head of school. Beaver would go on to acquire ownership of the school in 1915 and preside over its growth until his death in 1969.

Riverside operated a winter campus in Florida for more than fifty years. In 1931, Sandy Beaver purchased the Hollywood Hills Hotel in south Florida. With the exception of brief time during World War II when the Navy used the Florida campus as a training facility, the school's cadets and staff would spend January through March at the Florida campus and the remainder of the school year would take place in Gainesville.

Facing tremendous commercial development in the area surrounding its Florida campus, the academy sold that property in 1984 to dedicate resources to the renovation of the Gainesville campus.

Riverside began its campus renovations in Gainesville in 1997 and completed the project in 2004. The renovations, totaling about $95 million, began with a new barracks building, which replaced nine older dormitory buildings, and included a new academic building, a new gymnasium, extensive renovations to its athletic fields, and a new library and performing arts center.

Today, as one of the few remaining all-boys college preparatory military schools, Riverside serves an enrollment of about 350 boarding and day students in grades 7-12. Its students hail from 25 states and 15 different countries each year.