Tallulah Falls School

At the edge of the Tallulah Gorge in the Blue Ridge foothills of north Georgia, a boarding school has been educating Appalachian children for more than a century. The Tallulah Falls School opened on July twelfth, nineteen oh nine, with twenty-one students from neighboring Habersham and Rabun counties. It was the answer to a question a Georgia woman had been asking for years: who is teaching the children of the mountains?

That woman was Mary Ann Lipscomb of Athens. In nineteen oh six, at a convention of the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, Lipscomb offered a resolution calling for the federation to establish a school at Tallulah Falls. In a letter to a Savannah newspaper she wrote: in no part of our state are industrial schools needed as in the mountains. The Federation accepted her challenge, raised money, purchased five acres on Cherokee Mountain, and built the first school building.

The original model was practical education alongside academics: boys worked the school's farm; girls learned homemaking, cooking, and domestic arts , the curriculum of its era, shaped by the belief that mountain communities needed skills as much as book learning. But underneath that pragmatism was something more urgent. Children in the mountain counties of Georgia had almost no access to secondary education in nineteen oh nine. The nearest high school could be a day's ride away. Families living in remote hollows had no realistic path to formal schooling without a residential institution.

Over the following decades, the school expanded, modernized, and survived. It outlasted the funding crises of the Depression, shifts in educational philosophy, and the changing demographics of Georgia's mountains. The Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs has maintained its support and connection for more than a hundred years.

Today Tallulah Falls School is a co-educational boarding and day school serving students from fifth grade through twelfth grade, drawing from dozens of Georgia counties. The gorge below the campus is nearly a thousand feet deep and about two miles long, one of the deepest east of the Mississippi. The students grow up looking at it. That dramatic landscape shaped the people who built this school, and it shapes the students who come here still.