8/19/2023 0 Comments Cardinal sarah![]() “She applied her knowledge wisely among her mountain-bound neighbors,” the paper wrote. Helen Henderson had been trained as a teacher but her grandfather had been a doctor and from him she had learned a few things. “Sanitary conditions were bad and many of the people did not know any remedies from sickness and suffering other than those handed down to them from their ancestors,” the Virginia Mountaineer wrote. She was shocked by the conditions she found in the area. Running the Buchanan County Mission School, which opened in August 1911, became a family affair, with Helen Henderson as the school’s assistant principal. What the Hendersons found in Council was a very different environment than the refined campuses they’d been accustomed to. Going down the mountain on the other side was considered more dangerous than going up. The wagon driver had to borrow a team of mules to make the summit of the mountain the passengers had to get out to lighten the load. Delivered every Friday afternoon.Īn account in The Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia described the arduous journey: The Hendersons had brought only cheese and crackers to eat, although they apparently stopped along the way to eat some apples from a tree near the roadside and drink water from a nearby spring. Get a roundup of the political news in our region and exclusive analysis from Executive Editor Dwayne Yancey. Don't miss out on all the politics west of the Richmond In Honaker, the Hendersons found someone who would take them over the mountain in his wagon, according to the Virginia Mountaineer account. Paul, then another train to Honaker and, well, after that, they were on their own. ![]() He, his wife and their two children went to investigate this new opportunity. The community of Council in Buchanan County wanted a school and somehow made contact with President Henderson. ![]() Four years later, another school beckoned - or, more accurately, a prospective school. In 1907, Dean Henderson became President Henderson at Franklin Female Seminary in Southampton County, Virginia. What’s important is that Helen Timmons soon became Helen Timmons Henderson and her husband rose within the college hierarchy to eventually become a dean. (Best not dwell too much on the propriety of a professor dating a student those were different days.) The professor’s horse was Bucephalus, but that’s not the name that’s important, either. That encounter led to a conversation, the exact nature of which isn’t clear, but it soon led to the two riding horses together, what we might today call a date. One day, Daisy almost ran over one of Timmons’ professors, a certain Robert Henderson. Sometime in the 1890s, she was a student at Carson Newman College, where “riding was one of her dearest hobbies,” according to a biography published in the Virginia Mountaineer newspaper. The horse’s name was Daisy but the more important name is that of its rider: Helen Timmons. A rambunctious horse in Tennessee changed the course of history in Virginia.
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