Historical Highway Markers

Sharon Indian School

OC-28

Sharon Indian School served as a center of education for the Upper Mattaponi Tribe. Tribal citizens built and furnished a one-room frame building ca. 1919. King William County replaced the original school with this brick structure in 1952. Before the desegregation of Virginia schools in the 1960s, Sharon provided a primary and limited secondary education. Its students had to attend other Native American, private, or public institutions, usually outside the commonwealth, to obtain high school diplomas. Upper Mattaponi students—and children from the Rappahannock Tribe in the 1960s—attended school here until June 1965. This was one of the last Indian schools to operate in Virginia.

Department of Historic Resources, 2024

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Bear Mountain Indian Mission School, National Register of Historic Places Archives File (05-230), DHR; Christian F. Feest, “Virginia Alogonquians,” in William C. Sturtevant and Bruce G. Trigger, Handbook of North American Indians: Northeast, Volume 15 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 266-267; Mattaponi Indian School, Department of Historic Resources Archives File (50-106), DHR; Nansemond Indian School, Department of Historic Resources Archives File (131-387), DHR; Pamunkey Indian School, Department of Historic Resources Archives File (50-110); Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002), 217-219, 220-221; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (Norman, Ok. and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 214, 235-237, 241, 265; “Sharon School To Be Closed,” The Tidewater Review 27 May 1965: 5; Malcolm Tuppance, History of Upper Mattaponi, s.n. 198?; Upper Mattaponi Indian Tribe, The Upper Mattaponi Tribal Spring Festival & pow Wow… (King William, Va.: Upper Mattaponi Tribe); Virginia Department of Education, Education Files, 1936-1967, Library of Virginia, Accession 29632, Box 1.