Interior, Bear Mountain Indian Mission School

Interior, Bear Mountain Indian Mission School

Virginia Indians, Monacan

Students sit at their desks inside the Bear Mountain Indian Mission School on the Monacan reservation near Bear Mountain in Amherst County, in 1914.

The log cabin, serving as a church, had existed on the site since about 1868. In 1908, the Episcopal minister Arthur P. Gray Jr. established Saint Paul's Mission and added classrooms to the cabin. The school enrolled students through the seventh grade until public school desegregation in 1964.

Jackson Davis (1882–1947) was a Cumberland County native who took this photograph and many others of the Monacans as part of a series documenting the education of minority groups in Virginia.

Jackson Davis

Jackson Davis, Papers, 1906-1947, Accession #3072, #3072-a, Negative Number 0024, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library

1914

Courtesy of University of Virginia Special Collections

central Virginia

twentieth century

Amherst

Photograph

4" x 6"