The Farm Family Program at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School

originally published November 2011 in Georgia Mountain Laurel

"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."
—Dr. Karl Anderson

Adapted from an interview with Dr. Karl Anderson—the lead article in "Daddy Was A Farmer," The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book's collection of personal stories about Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School's immensely-influential Farm Family Program from both adults and students who participated in it.

The Farm Family Program intrigued me when I first visited the school. I discovered that the school provided education for families living on its farms, as well as serving as a boarding school for young people from 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 and turning it into an opportunity.

Following the example of other schools, Rabun Gap acquired nearby land to 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 a rotating schedule, they could supply most of the labor for the farm. Girls had a similar schedule centered more on food preparation and other activities needed to keep the school going.

In 1917–18, America declared war on Germany. World War I 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 extensive farming activities, the loss of boys to the armed forces presented the school with a serious problem.

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The Ritchies saw a possibility in this challenge. Some of the land they acquired still had the houses of the families who had sold the land. The Ritchies brought families from this area to these houses to farm the land that students had once farmed. They were not interested in simply having tenant farmers, though. They would limit the time a family could spend at the school to five or six years. The children of the Farm Family Program were expected to stay in school, in a time when many children would drop out by eighth grade to work on their own farm or find employment.

This was also the birth of a unique adult education program. The men could be trained in more modern, more scientific methods of farming, and the wives got together for meetings and trainings with the school’s home economics teacher. When the family would leave to go to a farm of their own, they took this training to other communities, benefiting themselves and the community to which they moved. Another family would then take their place at the school, and the cycle would begin again.

Farm families got to live on a tract of land, including a home, barn, et cetera, and 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 families 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 with their own farms, but they had five years to bring their children up in a good place, a good setting, and better homes.