Amherst Indian School and Mission: Falling Rock

Amherst Indian School and Mission: Falling Rock

Virginia Indians, Monacan

A schoolhouse and chapel stand at Falling Rock, near Bear Mountain, in the Monacan Indian settlement near Bear Mountain in Amherst County, in 1914.

A 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, by adding classrooms to the cabin, the Bear Mountain Indian Mission School. 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 0018, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library

1914

Courtesy of University of Virginia Special Collections

twentieth century

central Virginia

Amherst

Photograph

4" x 6"