While at her family home, Lisa Custalow, founder of The Children of Shenandoah, heard the stories of a teacher who came to the mountains of what is now Shenandoah National Park.
“I grew up hearing the story of Christine Vest from the descendants of the mountain people who attended,” Custalow explained. “It is a part of the history of Shenandoah National Park that is often overlooked when people talk about the national park’s creation.”
Shenandoah National Park is just a few hours from Washington, D.C., and is known for its hiking trails, including part of the Appalachian Trail, and natural beauty, with forests and waterfalls. However, the area’s history did not begin with the creation of the park itself.
Families once called this stretch of rural mountains home, and needing a reprieve from Washington, President Herbert Hoover decided to create Camp Rapidan in the area. His expectations for Camp Rapidan were a retreat away from the problems of Washington, not a place where he would find one.
However, on one of Hoover’s trips to the site, he met a young boy named Rae Burraker, who brought the president an opossum for his birthday. Upon having a conversation with the boy, Hoover realized this young man and his siblings had never been to school. With that knowledge, Camp Rapidan became not just a reprieve but also a mission field for education.
To educate the area children, a schoolhouse needed to be constructed, and a teacher had to be found. The teacher could not just be anyone, as many of these soon-to-be students had never been to school before. The Hoovers needed someone who was familiar with a rural community in the mountains and experienced with students in those communities. Mrs. Hoover found a student teacher from Berea College whom she thought fit all the requirements.
Christine Vest was originally from Yosemite, Kentucky, and she came to Berea with the intention of becoming a teacher. When Vest received the offer to interview with the Hoovers in Washington, D.C., she was still a student at Berea College. She was training at the Berea College Training School teaching fifth and sixth grade when she was offered the position at the Hoover Mountain School.
Subsequently, Berea released Vest from her position, and she traveled to Camp Rapidan. Vest was chosen because of her experience working with students from remote areas in Kentucky and her extensive knowledge of this type of community. “Lou Henry Hoover trusted that Berea College would create a teacher that would be able to come into the Blue Ridge Mountains and teach students,” explained Custalow.
The New York Times reported on Feb. 6, 1930, “With all the advantages that city children enjoy, in point of convenience, of comfort and of quality of teaching, as compared with rural children generally, many a person would wish to be a child again out on the frontier, especially under such a teacher as has been engaged to take charge of the little group of mountain children, till now unschooled, among the trees and birds and wild creatures. Miss Christine Vest herself was a mountain child, and though (thanks to that remarkable institution, Berea College, Kentucky) she got a college education, she went back among the mountains to teach, first in her own community, then in ‘Mulberry Gap,’ Tennessee, then out among the ‘coves and hollows’ in a county of 10,000 people without a railroad, then back to Berea to train other mountain teachers.”
The community of Dark Hollow surrounding Camp Rapidan welcomed Vest with open arms and excitement as children and adults alike were able to receive an education from the Hoover Mountain School. It was a focal point for community growth and development.
According to “Hoover Heads,” the blog of the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum published by the National Archives, “The President’s Mountain School opened on Feb. 24, 1930, with 17 children in attendance, including Rae Burraker and five of his siblings.” There was so much excitement that Vest did not begin teaching her material on opening day.
For four years, Vest lived at the school and taught the children many skills like reading, writing and math, which would prove to be important when their family lands were taken to create the national park.
“Miss Vest introduced them to the modern world beyond their remote mountain homes,” according to the blog. “She taught them about cities and the commerce and industry found there. They learned about units of measurement, time and money, and how to order goods from the Sears catalog. Some of the girls learned to make or repair clothing with an electric sewing machine. Miss Vest took the students on field trips to the county fair, and even to Washington, D.C., where they had lunch at the White House. For most of the children, it was the first time they had traveled more than a few miles from home or ridden in an automobile.”
Vest taught at the school until 1933, when she married Lou K. Witcofski, one of the U.S. Marines assigned to protect the Rapidan retreat.
After Hoover left office, enrollment at the mountain school declined as residents in the surrounding area were displaced under a sweeping condemnation law, making way for the creation of Shenandoah National Park in 1935. Custalow is a descendant of the mountain people who inhabited the land that would become Shenandoah National Park.
“It’s fair to say that we families have a conflicted relationship with the national park,” she said. “It was our family land, but it is now something that belongs to the national government. That doesn’t change what Christine Vest did here. She gave the mountain people something that they didn’t have access to previously: education.”
