Windows on the Past
The Cultural Heritage of Vardy
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Oral histories and images of Melungeon daily life, such as church gatherings and family activities, are featured in this book by Vardy native DruAnna Williams Overbay. By focusing on the Vardy Community School and the Vardy Community Church, a vivid description of the community and its historical buildings is included. Interviewees discuss the classroom environment and teaching activities within the school, affording readers the opportunity to experience Melungeon culture through the intimate voices of oral histories. At the time of its founding in the late-19th century, the Vardy Community School, a Presbyterian mission school, was the only institution providing primary education to children of the multi-racial Melungeon communities living in the remote mountainous areas along the Tennessee-Virginia border.
In 1892, the Presbyterian Church decided to build a school at Vardy, a community in the heart of Melungeon country along Blackwater Creek, on land donated by Batey Collins, the grandson of Melungeon patriarch, Vardemon “Vardy” Collins. Over the next forty-five years, the mission school complex expanded to include a three-story frame schoolhouse, a church, a manse, a library, and several residences for teachers and children.
Windows on the Past author, DruAnna Williams Overbay, was born in the farmhouse two doors west of the church and attended the Vardy Community School, where her parents, Drew B. and Alyce Horton Williams, were teachers. DruAnna, third great-granddaughter of Vardemon Collins, and other Collins-Horton-Williams descendants have owned and lived on the original Vardy homestead for seven generations.
Windows on the Past author, DruAnna Williams Overbay, was born in the farmhouse two doors west of the church and attended the Vardy Community School, where her parents, Drew B. and Alyce Horton Williams, were teachers. DruAnna, third great-granddaughter of Vardemon Collins, and other Collins-Horton-Williams descendants have owned and lived on the original Vardy homestead for seven generations.