Indian Schoolchildren at Recess

Students play at recess in front of the Bear Mountain Indian Mission School, 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 Pauls Mission and added classrooms to the cabin. The school enrolled students through the seventh grade untilpublic school desegregationin 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. Description courtesy of the Virginia Indian Archive.