Dr. Andy's Crop

Old Uncle Rollin Coffee looked up from his hoeing and hailed Farmer Riley Ritchie, coming up the road.

"Well, Rile, I hear Andy's come home agin. Did he graduate this time?"

"Nope."

Uncle Rollin ran his callused fingers through his white hair, spat and said: "Well, Rile, I don't know nothin' about a college. But I know one thing. There must be a heap to larn at college or else your Andy larns mighty slow!"

But gaunt young Andrew Jackson Ritchie, back home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northeastern Georgia for the second time because he had run out of money, went back to college for a third, fourth and fifth time. Finally, at 32, he made it, came home to shake under Uncle Rollin's nose a diploma from Harvard, where he graduated in 1899 with Henry James and a heap of other smart men.

Andy went off to teach college in Texas, but he soon got homesick for the purple, smoky hills and unlearned mountain folk of Georgia. So back he went, bought himself a small piece of land and began to keep school for his neighbors. His school, first called Rabun Gap, eventually merged with a small Presbyterian school with the Indian name Nacoochee and became the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School. "Dr. Andy" developed it into a hillbilly college even stranger than its name. One part is a junior college for boys & girls, who mix book learning with farm work, which pays most of their $222-a-year board and tuition. The other part is a school for farmers' families--papa, mama and all the kids.

Dr. Andy believed that what Georgia's hut-dwelling, soil-scratching, God-fearing mountain folk needed most was someone to teach them how to live and farm better. He bought more land, put up neat, comfortable farmhouses, let each family farm 40 acres with teachers to show them how. In classroom sessions that are more like town meetings than classes, the men talk about soil, animals and crops, the women discuss better housekeeping. Children spend part of their day in school, part learning chores. As payment for instruction, house and land, each family returns part of its produce to the school--half the crop on bottom lands, a third on hillsides. In choosing his students, Dr. Andy has observed two strict rules: he admitted only families that 1) had many children, 2) agreed to move on after five years to apply their learning on farms of their own.

Today Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School has 1,600 acres, a small endowment, a herd of 40 cattle, a new beef barn just completed by its students. Last week old Dr. Andy, now 75 and retired, noted with satisfaction that his little school was giving a good account of itself beyond, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. Seventy of his boys, nearly a third of all who have graduated from his junior college, went off to fight for their country. One, Marine Elza O'Neal, was captured on Wake Island ("Send more Japs"); another, Lieut. William R. Ussery, was killed in action in a plane in the Pacific; a third, Lieut. Denver Truelove, flew with Jimmy Doolittle to bomb Tokyo.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.