The Maier Museum of Art was designed as a bomb shelter, and it looks like it.

Constructed in 1952 as a shelter for the treasures of the National Gallery of Art in the event of war or nuclear attack, the building was given to Randolph-Macon Woman's College (now Randolph College) in the 1970s, and now houses its stellar small collection of American art.

Much of the credit for that collection goes to Louise Jordan Smith, a college art and French professor at the turn of the 20th century.

Described variously as "imposing," "a mythic figure" and "rather eccentric," she initiated an annual exhibition of paintings from New York's finest galleries to pique interest in a permanent collection. When the 1920 exhibition brought George Bellows' "Men of the Docks" to Lynchburg, a new collections committee, directed by Smith, set out to find a way to buy it.

More than a century later, the core of the museum's 3,500-piece collection reads like a who's who of American art, including works by Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper and Mary Cassatt.

The Maier, named for a Charleston, W.Va., family that established an endowment for its maintenance, is far from perfect. The building was built mostly for storage, not exhibitions, and the exhibit space is small.

On the other hand, admission is free. And then, there's the art.

"The first time I walked in there I was amazed at what we had," Anita Solow, the school's then-vice president for academic affairs, told a Roanoke Times reporter in 2000. "You look at the Bellows, you look at the Hopper. It's astonishing, and a tribute to the woman who started it."

Smith died in December 1928, leaving to the college her antiques and paintings and financial assets -- the last to be placed in a trust fund for the purchase of additional art.

The amount of the Smith trust fund is not public knowledge, but it was used effectively from the start. The first acquisition from the fund: "Mrs. Scott's House" by Edward Hopper, in 1936.

-- Kevin Kittredge