History & Presbyterian Heritage

Rabun Gap Industrial School, circa 1920

The founding of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School and its longstanding relationship with the Presbyterian Church is both fascinating and inspirational.  Rabun Gap began as two schools: Nacoochee Institute and Rabun Gap Industrial School.  The Institute was established in 1903, in White County, Georgia.  That year, the Reverend Joel Wade, a Presbyterian educational missionary, arrived in the community of Sautee to take over the grammar school and put it on solid footing.  A few years later, the Reverend John Knox Coit became head of the school and helped to develop a rigorous liberal arts curriculum in the classical academic tradition.

Meanwhile, 40 miles to the east in Rabun County, Georgia, Andrew Jackson Ritchie,  the county's first college graduate, who at the time was teaching at Baylor University, had decided to return to the mountains of Georgia to help educate and give hope to the isolated people of this region.  In 1905, on our present campus and near the site of the school he attended as a boy, Ritchie and his wife, Addie Corn Ritchie, established what was then called the Rabun Gap Industrial School.  Students not only attended classes; they also worked the school farm, growing and preparing all their food and maintaining the school's buildings, including their dormitories.

In February 1926, an untimely fire destroyed the Industrial School's main building.   A month later another fire wiped out nearly all the infrastructure of the Nacoochee Institute in White County.  That school also was a farm school for poor boys and girls of the mountain region and was owned and supported by the Presbyterian Synod.  Soon thereafter, the Boards of Trustees of the two schools voted to merge the two institutions and build a larger and stronger school at Rabun Gap.                                                                                     

Since that time, Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School has prospered.  In its early years, Dr. Ritchie's Farm Family program drew the attention and support of philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and George Woodruff, as well as the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. which has continued  its commitment to the School.  For a time, the School became a  junior college and later served as both a boarding school and the local public high school for day students.   The School also is the birthplace of the internationally famous Foxfire Books which celebrate and preserve the traditions and culture of the mountain families who helped shape the Southern Appalachian region.

 As Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School has evolved into one of America's premier independent boarding and day schools, its history and heritage continue to inspire young people of today.   Now in its second century of service, RGNS is prospering thanks to the dedication and vision of its founders and the solid foundation they built more than 100 years ago.