The Vardy Community School was a Presbyterian mission school established in the Vardy community of Hancock County, Tennessee, United States, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. At the time of its founding, the school was the only institution providing primary education to children of the multi-racial Melungeon communities, who lived in the remote mountainous areas along the Tennessee-Virginia border. Part of a segregated system, it was restricted to children considered black or multiracial. Presbyterian missionaries operated the school until 1955; following the United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling that segregated schools were unconstitutional, it became part of the Hancock County public school system. In 1984, the school and the structures associated with the mission community that developed around it were designated as a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Vardy Community School Historic District. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dozens of settlement schools and mission schools were established across rural Appalachia. In 1892 the Presbyterian Church decided to build such a school at Vardy, a community located near the heart of Melungeon country in the Blackwater Creek Valley. Over the next forty-five years, the mission school complex expanded to include a three-story frame schoolhouse, a church, a manse, a library, and several residences for teachers and children. Although the schoolhouse has collapsed, the school's alumni and other historical groups have preserved its ruins and related structures as a historic site. In 2000, the 19th-century log cabin belonging to Melungeon moonshiner Mahala Mullins was relocated to a site across the street from the Vardy School district. Location The Vardy community, sometimes called "Vardy Valley," is situated in a narrow valley carved by Blackwater Creek between Newman's Ridge on the south and Powell Mountain on the north. The valley, part of the Clinch River watershed, stretches for roughly from Mulberry Gap southwest of Vardy to the Blackwater community in Lee County, Virginia to the northeast. Vardy is still relatively isolated, its primary access being from Sneedville via State Highway 63, which crosses Newman's Ridge through a series of steep switchbacks before intersecting Vardy Blackwater Road near Mulberry Gap. The Vardy School Community is located along Vardy Blackwater Road about east of the road's junction with TN-63. History In the early 19th century, the early Melungeon settler Vardeman "Vardy" Collins (1764–?) received a grant for a