Brocks Gap Schools: Bergton, Criders, and Fulks Run

Ritchie, Pat Turner

From the introduction: This book's goal was to publish as many photographs and as much information as possible about every school in Brocks Gap. From the 1740s to the present day there were about fifty different schools. Schools before the 1870s were private and left few records and no photographs. More records, though not complete ones, exist for schools after 1870, but there are still mysteries to be solves, like teachers' names before 1910.

The first white Brocks Gap settlers came in the 1740s. From then until 1870, getting a basic education was hit-or-miss. There were no public schools. Parents had to arrange and pay for their children's schooling. School sessions were held in a room in someone's house or in a small outbuilding on a farm. There is evidence that by the 1790s, Michael Baker, a wealthy landowner in the Riverside Church area of Fulks Run, had a schoolhouse on his property in the Lairs Run area, the earliest reference to a school house in Brocks Gap. 

384 pages; Index, self-published, 2026.