About Christopher Gist The School
Historical Perspective
Origins of CGHS Name and Emblems
Christopher Gist was born in Baltimore in 1706. Gist
was trained as a surveyor by his father who was
prominent in that profession and was one of the people
responsible for plotting the City of Baltimore.
By 1750 Christopher Gist lived in Yadkin Valley, North
Carolina, where he was a neighbor to Daniel Boone. Gist
was contracted by The Ohio Company to explore and map
the country of the Ohio River. Throughout 1750 and 1751,
Gist kept a journal, presumably for reference in
creating finished documents for his clients. In his
journal he chronicled the movements of himself and a
small party of men who explored and mapped the Ohio
countryside from present-day Pittsburgh to the Great
Miami River (west of present-day Cincinnati). There the
Gist party crossed into Kentucky and eventually made
their way back to Yadkin Valley. It was that return
journey that brought Christopher Gist through the Pound
basin, site of present-day Pound.
On Tuesday,
April 2nd, 1751, Gist killed a buffalo, somewhere along
what we now know as South Fork. On Wednesday, April 3rd,
1751 he and his party reached a large encampment of
Indian warriors situated at the mouth of a small creek
(Indian Creek). The War Chief in command of the camp was
named The Crane. Apparently, The Crane treated Gist and
his party hospitably, allowing them to stay there and
rest their horses. Gist and his party departed from the
camp on
Saturday, April 6th, 1751.
From this
snippet of colonial history, featuring a white
frontiersman and explorer named Christopher Gist, and a
tomahawk wielding War Chief named The Crane,
fast-forward some 170 years. A four-room high school was
built very near the spot where the Warrior's Camp had
stood.
Someone very astutely and aptly named
the school Christopher Gist High School and adopted as
the school's emblems the arrowhead and the tomahawk. One
can imagine the energy and excitement with which those
tributes to a distant past were contemplated. One may
also comprehend that, with the passage of time, the
distant past and not-so-distant past eventually meld
together.
Additional Information about Pound and Christopher Gist Schools
Christopher Gist High School served Pound, Virginia
for a twenty-five year period, beginning in the late
1920's. The small high school drew its student
population from the entire, sparsely populated, Pound
River Basin lying in the Appalachian Mountains of
Southwestern Virginia.
CGHS graduated its final
class, consisting of thirty-six students, in May, 1953.
The school closed around Thanksgiving of that same year,
having been replaced by a new Pound High School, no
longer named Christopher Gist.
It is presumed
that early in the twentieth century Christopher Gist was
a name of some notoriety in and around Pound, Virginia.
Gist was indeed a significant historical figure, whose
accomplishments as a woodsman, explorer, map maker, and
emissary on the western frontier of Colonial Virginia
during the 1750's were widely known, and perhaps
unrivaled, among his peers. Gist was, in fact, a major
contributor to the history-making developments of his
time.
