Monacan Grandmother and Child

A child and an elderly woman, both Monacan Indians, pose in the door of a log cabin at the Monacan Indian settlement in Amherst County in 1914. The woman was reportedly the grandmother of forty-three or forty-eight children, most of whom, according to the photographer, had attended school. Founded in 1908 by the Episcopal minister Arthur Gray, the one-room school at the settlement enrolled students through the seventh grade untilpublic school desegregationin 1963.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. Description courtesy of the Virginia Indian Archive.