Valley View

Valley View, off Farm Road 1649, eight miles east of Gilmer in eastern Upshur County, was first settled about 1880. A local school opened before 1895, and in 1897 it had an enrollment of twenty-eight Black students. The Valley View community consisted of several African American families that were one or two generations removed from slavery. They were mostly farmers or owned farm-related businesses. Oral tradition holds that most families owned several hundred acres of land, and the Henry Williams family owned more than a thousand acres. Close knit and self-sufficient, the families lived off the land through agriculture and hunting and promoted the educational welfare of their children.

In the 1920s the school had evolved into a two-teacher facility named the Sand Hill School and was a Rosenwald school built in 1922. A Professor Willis served as principal. Thomas Jefferson Downs, a math professor at Bishop College, was recruited as principal of Sand Hill School in 1927. Downs spearheaded the effort to obtain a Rosenwald grant and matching community funds to build a new six-room school, the Upshur County Training School in 1929–30. Residents raised money through penny sales, baked sales, meat sales from livestock, and the sales from their crops. A vocational shop to facilitate vocational/industrial training was constructed in 1930–31, and a teachers home that housed Downs and his wife, along with several female teachers, was built in 1931–32.