I’m not a big user of Twitter. Most of the accounts I follow belong to historic homes and gardens in England. So when I received a notification of a tweet from someone I did not know, I figured it was a spam tweet. Instead, that tweet led to the 1920s and a young woman from New Brunswick, New Jersey, and her mission work in a tiny town known as Frenchburg, Kentucky. The mystery tweet linked past and present with a wonderful story.
Historic photo of the Frenchburg School campus.
I first wrote about the Frenchburg School in the fall of 2018.* In the first decade of the 20th century, Menifee County, which is nestled at the western edge of Eastern Kentucky, lacked the resources to fund a public high school.
Frenchburg, Kentucky, on a 30′ topographic map from 1892.
In 1908 the Presbyterian Church decided to oversee the establishment of a church and school in the county seat town of Frenchburg. Residents of Menifee County donated not just money, but considerable labor to making the school a reality.
Entry door to the Girls Dormitory at the Frenchburg School.
Most of the Frenchburg school, closed in 1957, is now gone. Neglect and fire have eroded a collection of brick and frame buildings that provided education and training to over 40 years of students.
And then, via the magic of social media, three beautiful black and white photographs from the 1920s arrived in my inbox. On the back of each photograph, in neat cursive writing (much more legible and pleasing to the eye than my own scrawl!) unfolded the story of each view.
The caption on the back of this photo reads: “This was taken in the fall of this year. The front path leads to the teacher’s dormitory. The school bell has just rung and the pupils are on their way in.” Photo taken by Gladys Hall, circa 1923.
The Presbyterian Church not only funded the construction of the campus in Frenchburg, but provided teachers for the school as well. Among many young women that traveled to the foothills of Kentucky was Gladys Hall, a member of the 1919 class of New Brunswick High School in New Jersey.
Gladys Hall in the early 1920s.
Gladys worked at the Frenchburg School for a year, before returning to New Jersey and eventually heading to India with her husband.
Gladys’ view of Frenchburg from the teacher’s dormitory.
In the above photograph, the small town nestles in the snow. Gladys wrote on the back: This is Frenchburg as we see it from our teacher’s dormitory. The snow was here two weeks ago.
The snow transformed the mountain landscape, as Gladys observed on the back of this photograph.
The teacher’s dormitory, built in 1921, (shown below) is one of the few buildings to escape the ravages of neglect over the decades. I can imagine Gladys standing at a window, perhaps already wrapped up to go outside, watching students romp and run in the snow.
The 2.5 story Teachers Residence is the most “domestic” in style of the three main buildings on the campus.
After working in Frenchburg for a year, Gladys returned to New Jersey, and in addition to attending nursing school, spoke to groups about her experiences in the “Mountain South.”
This article ran in the October 8, 1924 edition of The Central New Jersey Home News.
From New Jersey to Kentucky to India – Gladys and her doctor husband (and their children) would live in India for 30 years before returning to the States in retirement. Even then, however, the desire to help others that prompted Gladys to venture to Frenchburg was not dormant. Gladys and her husband moved to Middlesboro, Kentucky, and spent four years working at the Daniel Boone Clinic.
Her brief time in Kentucky may have been eclipsed by decades in India, but were it not for Gladys and other men and women seeking to serve and educate, then the Frenchburg School would not have succeeded. And her photographs are such a powerful reminder of the energy and life that once filled the school, transforming the reality of what happened to the campus into a bittersweet reminder of all that it once represented and held.
*Follow this link for my October 2018 post on the Frenchburg School: https://wp.me/p527lo-By
I think Donnie Maynear is who burnt the building
Amazing how time changes everything