Excerpted from: Community Involvement in Rural Schools:

A case study of the schools in the Leicester and Sandy Mush communities

by  Patricia Duckett Brown, EdD

   Camp Academy was built on the site in Leicester of the old Turkey Creek Camp Meeting grounds, at which Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury had preached almost a century before the beginning of the school. “Camp meetings” of the time were large community gatherings which were most often religious assemblies.

   Throughout the nineteenth century, the property had remained in the hands of the Methodist Episcopal Church and that of the Reynolds family who owned the adjoining property. Leicester had become an incorporated town in 1859 (The charter was dissolved in 1905), and by 1896, had a population of about two hundred fifty. This made it one of the largest towns in Buncombe County, outside of Asheville. Its population, the convenience of a ready tract of available land for building, and the financial and property support of the nearby Reynolds family, apparently dictated the choice of the school’s building site.

    The academy apparently opened in the fall of 1896, though its main building was not completed until 1897. Its campus consisted of at least two buildings; one was a two story wood-frame house that was used to house students who boarded at the school. This building stood until the early 1980s and had been used as a private residence for many years after the academy closed. It was later abandoned and dismantled. The site of this building stood about one-fourth mile from the main campus structure, which still stands today. This building was erected and opened in 1897, built of locally-made brick with a wooden porch across the front. The school was two stories tall. It contained wide central hallways on both floors and had four classrooms on each floor; two were located per floor on each side of the central hall (United States Department of the Interior, 1984). It was quite an imposing building for a small rural North Carolina community of its day. When Camp Academy was built, all of Leicester and Sandy Mush only contained four other brick buildings. Of those, three were private homes and one was a church built in 1876. These were spread throughout the area; only the church stood in reasonably close proximity to the school (Bishir, Southern, & Martin, 1999). The school’s size and imposing architecture even today bears witness to the community’s support for education over time. Camp Academy’s main building is the only remaining academy structure left in Buncombe County.

    A.C. Reynolds was the school’s first principal from its 1896 opening until 1900, when he left the school to take the position of president of Rutherford College in Burke County. In the school’s earliest days, he may have been its only instructor, as well as its principal. An article in the Asheville Gazette dated December 22, 1897, announced an “entertainment” at Camp Academy on December 23 with “refreshments and good music.” The article went on to praise Reynolds as a “thorough instructor” and pronounced the school a “great success” with an enrollment of about sixty-five students Asheville Gazette, December 22, 1897). By March of the following year, another article in the Asheville Gazette discussed commencement exercises for Camp Academy. Enrollment at that time was given as being over one hundred students (Asheville Gazette, March 24, 1898).

   Camp Academy in 1900 began a “partnership” with the public schools of Buncombe County. This began near the end of Reynolds’s four-year tenure at the school. North Carolina, in the push for quality public schools, had instituted normal schools and training schools for teachers throughout the state. While Reynolds was at Camp Academy, D.L. Ellis, superintendent of Buncombe County’s public schools from 1897 to 1899, had organized teacher training institutes in each major section of the county. The one initiated for the western portion of the county was held at Camp Academy, even 90 though it was a private school. From 1900 to 1903, a Mrs. Humphries taught a teacher training institute at Camp Academy. Concurrently, academy classes were taught for well over one hundred students (Miller, 1965). This public/private partnership apparently continued for several more years, until Camp Academy closed in 1913. Today, apartments occupy the large brick building, which is within view from the top of its public successor, Leicester School.

Camp Academy's best known graduate was undoubtedly Bascom Lamar Reynolds, "Minstrel of the Mountains"