God’s Acre: Former Native American boarding school reveals complex history
SPRING PLACE — Near the edge of this tiny North Georgia community lies a grassy field topped with rustic split-rail fences and weathered gray stone monuments. Called “God’s Acre,” this is the final resting place for a diverse group of people who shared a remarkable history featuring famous visitors, earthquakes and war.
Among those buried here are a 12-year-old Cherokee student named Dawnee Watie; a white Christian missionary and botanist who taught her, Anna Rosina Gambold; and several Black people who had been enslaved, including Christian Jacob. All were connected to a school Moravian missionaries operated here for Cherokee children before Native Americans were forced west on the deadly Trail of Tears.
Spring Place appears on a list of more than 400 Native American boarding schools the federal government supported or operated across the United States before 1969. The Biden administration compiled the list, saying it was acknowledging the federal government’s role in forcibly separating Native American families, assimilating them and stripping them of their lands.
Now a bipartisan group of U.S. senators is sponsoring legislation to continue investigating the schools and their lasting impact on Native Americans, part of an ongoing debate over how the United States should recognize a particularly dark part of its history.
How Spring Place fits into that history isn’t fully settled. The Biden administration’s findings don’t allege any wrongdoing by the school. Plus, historians point out, Cherokee people supported its establishment. But at the same time, there are gaps in knowledge that additional research could fill.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was able to assemble a detailed but still incomplete portrait of Spring Place by drawing on interviews with experts; National Park Service and Georgia Department of Natural Resources records; the New Georgia Encyclopedia; and the Moravian missionaries’ translated diaries.
Complicated and compelling, the school’s history still reverberates today in Georgia and all the way into the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.
‘From darkness to light’
Much of what is known about Spring Place comes from what Anna and John Gambold wrote in their mission’s diary and correspondence. Also called Unity of the Brethren, their Christian faith traces its origins to the 15th century in what is the present-day Czech Republic. The Gambolds traveled in 1805 to Spring Place, which got its name from the natural springs flowing there.
Five years earlier, Cherokee leaders James Vann and Charles Hicks encouraged the Cherokee Council to allow the Moravian school’s establishment on land Vann purchased for it. Under pressure from land-hungry American settlers pushing west, according to some historians, Cherokee people wanted their children educated for the challenges they saw ahead. They were also seeking to forestall removal from their homeland.
Vann, the son of a Scottish trader and a Cherokee woman, became a wealthy businessman and plantation owner in North Georgia, where his family had at least 100 Black slaves.
The Moravian missionaries brought an enslaved woman with them to Spring Place in 1805, according to the National Park Service. Named Pleasant, she cooked and cleaned for the Moravians’ school and church.
In 1801, Vann’s daughter, Sarah, became the first of more than 100 Cherokee children to be educated there. Meanwhile, the Moravian mission grew to include a chapel, a dormitory, a “house for strangers,” farm buildings, grain fields and orchards.
In a letter he sent the U.S. Department of War from Spring Place in 1819, John Gambold wrote his school taught English, reading and writing as well as farming, sewing and knitting. Though he underscored his mission had another priority.
“Our main objective being the preaching of the gospel, and to be instrumental in the turning of the natives from darkness to light — all, both old and young, are instructed in the Christian religion, as revealed in the Bible,” Gambold wrote.
The Moravians converted prominent Cherokees, including Hicks and his niece, Margaret Ann Vann Crutchfield, both of whom are buried at God’s Acre. Like Vann, Hicks was the son of a white trader and Cherokee mother.
Attached to Gambold’s letter to the Department of War was a passage from the Moravians’ “United Brethren’s Missionary Intelligencer.” It says, in part, “the most indigent and degraded” Cherokee people lived in towns, while the “great and more respectable” lived “on their plantations, and thus acquire those habits of industry and sobriety, which are uniformly counteracted by their congregating together.”
“Hence, it has become a principle of sound policy in the government of the United States to employ all its influence to wean them from that habit, and to encourage the plantation system,” the Moravians wrote.
Left unstated was that more than 90% of Cherokee lands had been ceded to others under pressure by 1819.
Department of War records show it approved $250 in annual funding for the Moravians’ Spring Place school plus a promise to pay two-thirds of its building expenses.
The Moravians’ diary entries show they were at times ethnocentric. They called Native Americans “miserable heathens” and wrote disapprovingly of their medicinal customs and “ball play” sport, which is similar to today’s lacrosse. The Moravians’ diary also shows they routinely fed and ministered to hungry and sick Native Americans.
“They would give what they had,” said Irina Garner, a Georgia DNR assistant manager at the Chief Vann House Historic Site, which features exhibits about the school’s history. “They were very free with their time and with their healing, too. If somebody was hurt, they would do their best.”
‘Kill the Indian in him and save the man’
Garner and others who have studied Spring Place’s history emphasize there are substantial differences between it and other Native American boarding schools, particularly those that opened later in the 19th century and required attendance.
Among them is the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which operated on a former military base in Pennsylvania from 1879 to 1918. Following a philosophy of “kill the Indian in him and save the man,” Carlisle used corporal punishment to prevent students from speaking their languages. More than 7,800 children from 140 tribes entered Carlisle, which also used hard labor as a form of punishment.
In contrast, according to Garner and others who have studied Spring Place’s history, the Moravian missionaries there did not make attendance compulsory and did not use corporal punishment.
“There is no reason to have an apology for the Spring Place Mission because we wanted it and it aided us,” said Jack Baker of Oklahoma, a former Cherokee Nation Tribal Council member who leads the National Trail of Tears Association. “The Moravians came and asked permission to create it. The Cherokees gave permission and gave their wholehearted support to the mission.”
Led by Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, more than two dozen senators are sponsoring legislation for investigating the impact of boarding schools on Native Americans, promoting healing for survivors and recommending federal action.
Murkowski spoke about her legislation during a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs meeting in March, saying: “It is long past time that we bring truth and healing to our Native people and help end the intergenerational trauma associated with this terrible legacy.”
Cherokee Nation and Moravian Church officials did not respond to requests for comments about Murkowski‘s legislation.
A spokesperson for U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum did not respond to emailed questions about Murkowski’s bill but said Burgum is reviewing the program his predecessor, Deb Haaland, started in 2021 for investigating the schools.
Baker’s association has not taken a position on the bill, though other Native American organizations have endorsed it, including the National Council of Urban Indian Health, the National Indian Child Welfare Association and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. The coalition has researched records concerning the boarding schools, including John Gambold’s correspondence with the Department of War about Spring Place.
“This bill would help shed light on what really happened at the school,” said Ponka-We Victors-Cozad, the coalition’s policy and advocacy director. She added she is related to students who died while attending Carlisle and a separate boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas. “Indian Country is behind this bill.”
‘Indescribable pain’
Of the nearly 19,000 Native American students who entered America’s boarding schools, at least 973 died while attending them, according to the Biden administration’s findings.
The Washington Post, however, reported last year that it had documented more than three times that number, drawing on government documents that also revealed children were beaten if they did not adhere to strict rules.
The AJC was able to identify only one student who died while attending Spring Place. The Moravians wrote in their journal about the “indescribable pain” of Dawnee Watie’s death on Sept. 27, 1812. That day, the girl started vomiting and lost her appetite. The missionaries gave her medicine and encouraged her to eat, according to their diary. They thought she ate a poisonous plant.
“She mostly preferred to be outside of the house, and we had difficulty talking her into staying inside,” the diary says. “It was the same today. Toward noon her situation seemed to become more serious, so we asked her to lie down in bed, which she did. However, while we were at (the) table, she sneaked out again. Sister Gambold went after her to bring her back but found her dying.”
The missionaries made a coffin for Dawnee and decorated her with flowers. White, Black and Native American mourners — including Dawnee’s parents — attended her memorial service.
The cemetery is part of the Spring Place Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service records say Dawnee is buried with 13 other people at God’s Acre. Another “child” was buried there in 1828, according to the records, though they don’t identify the child or say whether that person attended the Spring Place school.
Nine years after Dawnee died, Anna Gambold’s “heart gave out,” her mission’s diary says. She was buried that year near Dawnee in God’s Acre. Also buried there are Hicks, Crutchfield and eight Black people who had been enslaved by the Vann family, according to historians and the National Park Service records. Among the enslaved people buried there is a skilled carpenter the Moravians called Christian Jacob.
None of the individual graves are marked. And some of those buried at God’s Acre have not yet been identified.
Rowena McClinton, a history professor emerita at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, translated the Moravian missionaries’ diary from German. While her translations show the Moravians occasionally wrote condescendingly about Native American customs, they also illuminate the respect and compassion the missionaries had for them and others, including enslaved Black people. The Moravians tended to sick and injured slaves and operated a Sunday school for them, helping them learn to read and write, McClinton said.
“There you have an incredible integrated community. They are eating and sleeping and worshipping together constantly,” McClinton said. “It is an exquisite story. It just gives me chills to be reminded of it.”
New Spring Place
The Moravians’ diary also records several major historic events. They wrote about the shocks they experienced from a series of powerful earthquakes that rocked the Southeast between 1811 and 1812.
In 1813, they wrote, 200 militiamen from east Tennessee camped near their school with 33 wagons on their way to the Creek War. That war, which featured bloody fighting between Native Americans and forces led by Tennessee militia commander Andrew Jackson, ended with a treaty ceding to the government millions of acres of Creek land.
Several notable people visited Spring Place or the Vann family’s home nearby. Among them was then-President James Monroe; Francis Gilmer, the son of one of former President Thomas Jefferson’s close friends; and Sam Houston, who would go on to defeat Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto after the fall of the Alamo in 1836.
The Spring Place school had closed by then. In 1830, then-President Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act. Around that time, Georgia passed laws making it easier for white people to dispossess Cherokee without the threat of legal consequences.
On Christmas Eve in 1832, Georgia militiamen demanded the Moravians close their mission. Then they used the school complex as their headquarters while they expelled Cherokee people. Thousands died while migrating west on the Trail of Tears.
Before that journey began, Moravian missionaries scouted a site for a new school in present-day Oaks, Oklahoma, according to the Oaks Indian Mission. Using land and books granted by Cherokee Chief John Ross, Moravians opened the school in 1842. They called it New Spring Place.
Now funded by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Oaks Indian Mission provides housing and other services for needy Native American children, said Dan Cooper, the mission’s executive director.
“We always say we are standing on the shoulders of the people before us — the missionaries,” Cooper said. “We are doing missionary work. This is a calling.”
A short walk from Cooper’s mission stands a stone monument that tells the story of a second God’s Acre. Among the many people buried there, according to the monument, are some who traveled west during the forced removal of the Cherokee people.
Famous Cherokee led Native American boarding school near Cartersville
A second Native American boarding school operated in Georgia during the 19th century, though far less is known about it than the one Moravian missionaries established earlier at Spring Place near Chatsworth.
Both schools are intertwined with the man who became editor of the country’s first Native American newspaper and signed the treaty that forcibly relocated Cherokee people on the deadly Trail of Tears.
Located near Cartersville between 1823 and 1834, High Tower Mission School was affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, according to U.S. Department of the Interior records created during the Biden administration. Those records do not show any students died at the school, which was also called Etowah Mission School or Etonee School.
A 1827 U.S. Department of War document shows the school was federally funded, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. The coalition also found an 1829 report by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions that says 15 children were boarded and taught at the school.
The coalition says the school was located just north of the Etowah River near a present-day mining company. The company’s president said he wasn’t familiar with it. He added his company wasn’t allowing visitors because of mining operations.
Among the people who worked at High Tower was Elias Boudinot, a Cherokee man from northwest Georgia who was originally named Gallegina “The Buck” Watie. He and two of his siblings enrolled at the Moravian school at Spring Place.
Boudinot’s 12-year-old sister, Dawnee, died while attending the Spring Place school in 1812. His younger brother Stand Watie was also educated by the Moravians and would later become a Confederate brigadier general during the Civil War, according to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.
Boudinot received an invitation in 1817 to attend the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions school in Cornwall, Connecticut, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Boudinot spent several years at the school, according to the encyclopedia, and converted to Christianity in 1820. Six years later, he married Harriet Ruggles Gold, the daughter of a Cornwall physician.
Between 1826 and 1827, Boudinot worked as a missionary and schoolmaster at High Tower, according to Ralph Henry Gabriel’s book, “Elias Boudinot: Cherokee & His America.” The mission, Gabriel wrote, was “tiny and somewhat dilapidated” when Boudinot arrived.
“On December 1, 1826, Elias and Harriett Boudinot came to High Tower to renew in that sector the war against heathendom,” Gabriel wrote. “By early January the building had been put in order and about a dozen scholars had been gathered.”
Boudinot is more well known for what he did after he left High Tower.
In 1828, he became editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. And he signed the New Echota Treaty of 1835, which led to the forced removal of Cherokee people to present-day Oklahoma, according to the encyclopedia.
After moving west with his family in 1839, Boudinot and two other treaty signers were assassinated.
About the Author
Jeremy Redmon is an award-winning journalist, essayist and educator with more than three decades of experience reporting for newspapers. He has written for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 2005.
