The newly restored Snickersville Academy
The newly restored Snickersville Academy, built in 1825 as Bluemont’s first school and church, will be open to visitors Saturday and Sunday from 10-4 during the 2016 Bluemont Fair, September 17-18. Come and see our restoration! A handsome new permanent sign in front of the building will tell visitors about the “Lives and Times of the Snickersville Academy.”
Snickersville Academy 1940’s
The newly restored Snickersville Academy
The Snickersville Academy—a simple, single-room log cabin, built by the settlers from native stone and trees—operated for about a half-century under the supervision of a group of volunteer neighborhood trustees.
Amos (1769-1829) and Elizabeth Clayton (1780-1839), who lived in the stone manor house Clayton Hall—and had 12 children between 1800 and 1828—donated a half-acre of their land for a schoolhouse behind the stone tavern across the street, now known as Carrington House.
The Academy sits in a wooded spot behind historic Carrington House on Snickersville Turnpike—right by the mountain stream that runs down through the backyards of Bluemont houses along the southeast side of Snickersville Turnpike.
The Snickersville Academy also served the community as a “free” or ecumenical church for 25 years. Then in 1851, about a decade before the Civil War, a new generation of neighbors built the village a new stone church (now the Bluemont United Methodist Church).
The Snickersville Academy ceased operations as a school when the multi-room Mountain Shadow Public School opened in the village in 1872
But all through the Civil War (1861-1865) and afterward, the village’s children kept coming to this one-room, rural schoolhouse to learn how to read, write, do arithmetic, and understand the wider world.
In 1872, a new multi-classroom and the village’s first public school—Mountain Shadow School—was built by the State of Virginia near the old stone church. It is now a private residence.
The “old schoolhouse” the Snickersville Academy, then became rental housing for almost a century, passing through various owners.
In 2010, when the final owner, the Hatcher family, sold their mountain farm to Boulder Crest Retreat (a new place of respite for military and veteran families), they gave the Snickersville Academy and the land on which it sits to Friends of Bluemont. The building’s restoration that began then is now complete.
The Snickersville Academy stopped operating as a church in 1851 when a stone church was built on Snickersville Turnpike