Once, when we lived in what is now the Rabun Gap–Nacoochee Middle School building, he told us about a young lad who liked to pick on other students. My papaw and his friends were tired of the bully and decided that one day they would pay him back. As it so happened, there was an outhouse located on the hill just above our house, and on the other side of the hill was the Methodist graveyard. The twinkle in Papaw’s eyes as he shared how he and a bunch of boys waited until that young lad went into the outhouse, and then how they turned that outhouse over on its side and sent it flying down the hill, told me of his satisfaction.
It was a time when families still ate supper together without the interruption of telephones and televisions, when hard work, sweat, and honesty were as much a part of living as eating, and when a man who wanted better for his children earned them an education and a way through a school rooted in those values. Andrew Ritchie knew there were capable families in and around this area who just needed a little assistance, and then they and their children would be able to fly off on their own. Logan E. Bleckley—chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and a good friend to Andrew Ritchie—said it best in a letter to obtain funding for the start-up of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School when he wrote, “I know their needs and their resources. With a few rare exceptions, they are an excellent population—none better anywhere within the range of my acquaintance—but they are poor. There is no school above elementary grades within the limits of the county. Children in that region abound; the valleys and hillsides literally swarm with them, and many of them have as bright a mind as can be found on earth.”
I am proud to be a grandchild of those wonderful, hardworking Farm Family Thurmonds, and I greatly appreciate the head start in farming and the education that Andrew Ritchie and the Farm Family Program provided to my family.
—Sheri Thurmond
Click here to view a larger image.
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Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Farm Family Program
~Dr. Karl Anderson~
Karl Anderson first came to Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School in 1950 as a member of a Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Accreditation Committee. At the time, he and his wife, Lib, were faculty members at Toccoa Falls Institute (TFI) and had learned to love the work and family atmosphere there. Mr. O. C. Skinner, president of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School and the board of trustees, had approached Dr. Anderson about leaving TFI to become business manager and business education teacher at RGNS; in addition, Dr. Anderson would be training to possibly replace Mr. Skinner as president of the school. There were a number of problems facing the school at the time. From 1932 to 1945 it was a junior college, but in 1945 the program was stopped because World War II had cut the school’s enrollment. In addition, an angry student had shot a dormitory houseparent in the stomach. Although Dr. and Mrs. Anderson were not eager to leave TFI, they saw a greater need for their training at RGNS. They were also assured that Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School wanted both spiritual and academic growth, so the Andersons packed up their belongings, using a School Farm truck as moving van, and began their many years of service at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School.
—Kaye Carver Collins
PLATE 93 “Here was a school that provided education for families living on its farms, as well as serving as a boarding school.”
When I became a member of the staff at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School in the fall of 1952, the Farm Family Program had been under way since 1917. Rabun Gap–Nacoochee was unusual among high schools in Georgia because it had both day students from the local community and boarding students from other communities and other states.
One of the special programs at Rabun Gap was the Farm Family Program. This intrigued me when I first visited the school on the accreditation team. I discovered that here was a school that provided education for families living on its farms, as well as serving as a boarding school for young people from many different states and as the high school for the Rabun Gap and Dillard communities.
As with other programs at Rabun Gap, this unique program developed from facing a difficult challenge that was turned into an opportunity by the Ritchies and their colleagues. The challenge? Under the leadership of Andrew “Andy” J. Ritchie, a native of Rabun County, Georgia, a school had been planted in the beautiful Tennessee Valley of northeastern Georgia by 1905.
Andy and his red-haired wife, Addie Corn Ritchie, were a talented and trained pair of educators raised in the mountains of northeastern Georgia but educated at the Georgia State College for Women for Mrs. Ritchie and Baylor, Harvard, and the University of Georgia for Dr. Ritchie. Their story is an important core of the Farm Family story.
Local high schools were rare in the mountains during Andy and Addie’s youth. To get a high school education, it was necessary to go to a boarding high school after elementary school. Unless the family lived in a community large enough to support a high school through their own taxes, education normally ended at the elementary school level. Addie Corn and Andrew Ritchie first met at a boarding high school near Hiawassee, Georgia.
PLATE 94 “I discovered that here was a school that provided education for families living on its farms, as well as serving as a boarding school for young people.” Fathers and sons plowing with a team of mules. Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School is in the background. Photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
Following this, Addie went to the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, Georgia. Andy went for a year at Emory at Oxford, Georgia, and then to Baylor College in Baylor, Texas, for a year. Running out of money, he read that at Harvard University a poor student might obtain a job and earn tuition. Andy obtained a railroad ticket and a small amount of money and left Rabun County for Boston for the possibility of an education at Harvard. After a year at Harvard, illness forced him to return to Georgia. He then enrolled at the University of Georgia and did the work required for an AB and a one-year course of the law school. After recovery he decided to go back to Harvard to prepare to teach English composition and literature at the college level.
Upon completion of his master’s degree, he obtained a position at Baylor University and married his high school sweetheart, Addie Corn, whose home had been Hiawassee, Georgia. On summer vacations in Georgia, they were reminded again and again of the inadequacies in education for mountain children, their own relatives, and others. From Baylor University, where Andy was teaching, they first traveled to Atlanta and then to Tallulah Falls Gorge by train. That was the end of the railroad, so they returned to their mountain home in Rabun County by horse and buggy.
PLATE 95 “Few would have funds enough to go outside of these mountains to get the needed high school education and maybe even go beyond.” Griggs Farm Family, photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
There in the beautiful mountains they were confronted with a kind of ugliness—educational poverty—that they had experienced themselves as youngsters. Now, as trained educators, they began to wonder why they were teaching in Texas, when the needs were so great for their relatives and friends in the mountains.
In 1903, they decided to work with people in their home community to raise funds to build a central school that would replace the smaller, poorer-staffed schools scattered throughout the area. This, I think, is the marvel of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee. Andy Ritchie was born on a farm located on what is now called John Beck Dockins Road. It is now the site of the thread plant called Parkdale. His father was a prosperous, hardworking farmer. Now, Andy and his wife, Addie, saw the lack of hope for most of the young people growing up where they had lived. Few would have funds enough to go outside of these mountains to get the needed high school education and maybe even go beyond.
Andy resigned his position at Baylor at the end of the academic year and set out with a dream to begin a school for the mountain children who were too remote to get a decent education beyond the first few grades. To people who had money, wherever he could present his case, he said, “I’
ve been a part of that community, and there are people who could advance if we could give them an education.”
He gathered the people of the community together and presented them with his dream. They raised what money they could from the local community, and Andy Ritchie developed friends in Athens and Atlanta and renewed contact with some of his Harvard classmates. After two difficult years of raising money, buying materials, and building the classroom facility, including dormitory space for the girls, a living facility for men was also erected at another site on the campus. The new school was opened in 1905.
[With the means they had], people were as self-sufficient as they could be. In those years students who came to the school from places beyond Rabun County were often fully grown adolescents from way back in the mountains who had little or no educational training beyond the elementary level.
Following the example of a few other schools, which tried to produce some of their own income, the Ritchies acquired land around the classroom building where they might raise crops and livestock to feed the students and to sell to make money to operate the school. The boys could work on the farm two days a week and go to classes for four days. Using the rotating schedule, they could help supply most of the labor for the farm. Girls had a similar schedule but centered more on food preparation and other activities needed to keep a school going. Some of the girls even worked at tasks on the farm, like hoeing; we have pictures of them working in the field.
PLATE 96 “Some of the girls even worked at tasks on the farm, like hoeing.” Photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
In 1917–18, America declared war on Germany. World War I armed forces now took many of the male students at Rabun Gap, who were often older than children in today’s high schools. They were at an age to become involved as volunteers and draftees. Now, with land for more extensive farming activities, the loss of boys to the armed forces presented the school with a serious problem of trying to produce crops on the acquired land without sufficient available labor.
The Ritchies saw a possibility in this challenge. Some of the land they acquired to be farmed by students still had the houses of the families who had sold the land. The Ritchies brought families from this area with children to these houses to farm the land that students had once farmed. Andy and Addie were not interested in simply having tenant farmers to till the land and raise the crops. They saw another opportunity from this challenge. They would limit the time a family could spend at the school to five or six years; then the family would go to a farm they had purchased or another farm somewhere to use their newly obtained skills.
At the school they would be replaced by a new family, which would come to farm the school land. This was the birth of a unique adult education program called the Farm Family Program. The children of the Farm Family Program would be expected to stay in school. In the early years of the twentieth century, many children would drop out by eighth grade to work on their own farm or to find some kind of local employment.
Mr. Lee Fry was in charge of the farm families, serving as farm manager. Under the direction of Mr. Fry, the men could be trained in more modern, more scientific methods of farming; then, after five or six years, they would move from this setting to other communities, sometimes a farm of their own. While the men were directed by the farm manager, the wives got together for meetings and trainings, at regular intervals, with the school’s home economics teacher. When the family would leave to go to a farm of their own, they brought this training to other communities, benefiting themselves and the community to which they moved. Another family would then take their place, and the cycle would begin again.
PLATE 97 “This was the birth of a unique adult-education program called the Farm Family Program.” Photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
Click here to view a larger image.
One of the early families was the Thurmond family. Mr. and Mrs. Thurmond and family moved to the Farm Family Program in the late 1920s. Mr. Thurmond then died, but Mrs. Thurmond and the family stayed on in the Farm Family unit that was provided to them. There were eight or nine children in that family. And from that they went their separate ways. One family was [that of] Clarence Thurmond. He became a longtime farmer up on Wolffork in the Rabun Gap community. He had a dairy farm. These were people of quality; they had something to work with. I say it that way because these were individuals that inherited certain capacities, and their families pushed them.
To become a Farm Family, you completed an application, and Mr. Fry and Mrs. Pleasants, or Dr. Ritchie in his time, studied the family, saw the potential within them. They were the people chosen, and not all of them succeeded! Some came in, and they weren’t willing to do what was required to be successful. You had to have a family, obviously. In other words, a man and woman by themselves without any children would not be eligible, nor would an older couple. The program was for the purpose of building a family in a good setting.
PLATE 98 “The men could be trained in more modern, more scientific methods of farming.” Photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
You got to live on a tract of land, including a home, barn, et cetera, and you got half of the end product. The other half went to the owner of the land, the school. “Sharecropping” in some places is a bad word because people have taken advantage of it, but this was sharing the crops. So the farmer got half of the corn; if you grew cattle, you got half. Several other families got started in what were once dairy units because they developed a herd and, when the time came, they bought a place, and they took their portion of the herd with them. Others did not follow through, but they had five years to bring their children up in a good place, a good setting, better homes.
Andy Ritchie sought and got financial backing for the Farm Family Program from foundations like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Other kinds of financial backing came only when Andy had raised money from other friends to match the funds coming from the foundations. Each Christmas, since I came to the school, and extending back, I don’t know how many years, each Farm Family was given citrus fruit and candies as a gift from the school.
With movement of small manufacturing plants into the South because industry found an abundance of labor willing to work, it was no longer necessary to earn a living from working on a farm from “can to can’t”—daylight to dusk. When I came in ’52, we still had what we call a house and a path. Do you know what was at the end of the path? A privy, yeah [laughs]! We got to the point where water was brought into the home spot, so we eventually had it so that every house had a house and a bath instead of a house and a path! You can’t visualize what it was like when there were no industrial-type factories here. There was nothing else to speak of. All you had was what you had on the farms.
With the entrance of small industry, a forty-hour workweek became a reality. Since the first large plant in Rabun County primarily employed women for sewing tasks, the men were called go-getters. Do you know what that means? It wasn’t because the men were lazy; the men didn’t have employment outside of their work on their farms at the time. So they would take the women to work in the morning, go home and do the farming or do whatever they were going to do, and then they’d go get her at the end of the day. Soon other plants like James Lee, the carpet-manufacturing company, came in to provide jobs for both men and women. The small farms, which had been the backbone of agriculture in Georgia, gave way to jobs in plants. By the mid-1960s, the day of the small farmer was over, and the need for the Farm Family Program had vanished.
The school used some of the land for a dairy unit of its own, using students to carry out many of the tasks under the work program. At one period of time, the school had four Farm Family dairy units. When families left the school Farm Family Program for local textile plants, the school consolidated these smaller milking units into a larger unit, which then milked about eighty cows each day. Some of the labor to operate the dairy unit was provided by school students through the school work plan.
/> According to a list gathered by the Farm Family Organization and staff at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School, there were 162 families and 824 children identified. The Farm Family Organization includes members and descendants of those families who participated in the Farm Family Program.
It would be difficult to measure the impact this large number of children from this many families had on the communities into which they moved and lived after their time at Rabun Gap. In all the contacts I have had with former Farm Family members, there has been appreciation expressed for what the years at Rabun Gap meant to them and to their family, for being given a leg up in life.
The Ritchies, and others who worked with them, had the ability to face problems, consider them as opportunities, and thereby develop new programs that enriched the lives of those attending the school, whether they were younger children in the classroom or adults living and working on the school farm as part of the Farm Family Program.
PLATE 99 “It would be difficult to measure the impact this large number of children from this many families had on the communities into which they moved and lived after their time at Rabun Gap.” Farm Family children circa 1950. Photo courtesy of Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School Archives
“I think it was the people that made it so special.”
~Frances Fry Deal~
Frances Fry Deal attended Rabun Gap–Nacoochee in the late thirties and early forties. Her father was responsible for many aspects of the day-to-day operations at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee. He was the farm family manager. He taught adults farming skills at night and students agriculture during the day. In addition, he was a coach and bookkeeper, a jack-of-all-trades. Frances also met her future husband, Jimmy, while attending RGNS.
The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book Page 42