At Watauga High School, social studies teacher Jamie Wilson started a history project for her Advanced Placement students surrounding the Junaluska community.
The Junaluska community is a diverse African American community that has resided within the Boone area for the greater part of Boone’s history.
Wilson believes that Junaluska is likely the oldest, if not one of the oldest, African America communities in Western North Carolina. It existed from the early to mid-1800s. Before the Civil War ended, several free African Americans lived in Watauga County, and the community grew after emancipation yet remained segregated for many years.
“You can walk there from downtown Boone, but most people wouldn’t know it’s there, unless you were aware of it,” Wilson said.
The inspiration for this project first came to Wilson from a former student and App State graduate who is from the Junaluska community.
“I first learned about the Junaluska community my first year here at Watauga High School,” Wilson said. “I had a student named Alana Patterson, who is an Appalachian alum. She is from that community and for her final project for the class, she made a short documentary about Junaluska.”
This project has given Wilson’s students information surrounding the history that has formed their present day-to-day lives. The students got to choose from a wide array of subjects to study surrounding the Junaluska community including buildings, events and people. The students then write a short essay surrounding their chosen research topic.
“I think they’ve been interested to sort of find those connections between past and present,” she said. “So to really understand, ‘Oh, I walked past that,’ ‘I used to play on that play on that playground when I was little.’ That’s kind of cool for them to be able to make some of those personal connections.”
This project has also given her students a chance to do a unique kind of research that has provided them with valuable lessons and tools for future research endeavors.
“One of the coolest things that they learned in their research is that not everything is on the internet. Like sometimes, you have to actually go to an archive to find a thing,” Wilson said.
Some of Wilson’s students wanted to look at the length of school board meetings when integration was being discussed. This required them to go to the county office and flip through the notebooks in person in order to get the information the needed.
Eli Bishop, one of Wilson’s students, felt this project expanded his interest in history and changed his view of the Boone community.
“It was kind of a history that was covered up a little bit, so it made me think more about different communities, what history has been covered and what history can be revealed through projects like this,” Bishop said. “It’s removed a lot of maybe stereotypes, assumptions or notions of Boone as a community. It’s usually stereotypically a white community, just like not a lot of diversity, but this was very revealing and it was nice to see the diversity that’s been in Boone.”
Another one of Wilson’s students, Sydney Moretz, said she felt like this project changed her view on the Boone community, as well as helped prepare her for future research endeavours in higher education.
“I feel like I never really thought of Boone as super diverse, but I feel like this has kind of opened that up to me and I feel like I can see it in a more diverse way now,” Moretz said. “I haven’t really done a ton of research projects up until now, and so learning how to cite images and all that kind of stuff I feel has been super important for going into college and higher classes.”
Wilson started this project in order to shed light on the more forgotten parts of history that are often left cold and overlooked.
“I’m really compelled by the ideas of hidden histories. These stories that are not known and widely discussed,” She said.
Wilson is dedicated to uncovering these forgotten stories and making sure they are shared.
“So certainly a forgotten population within a forgotten population is something that is really special and that I think needs to be highlighted and preserved and taken care of and I just think more people need to know about it.”
