Students Inside Bear Mountain Indian Mission School

Students sit at their desks inside the Bear Mountain Indian Mission School on the Monacan settlement 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 St. 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.

Description courtesy of the Virginia Indian Archive.