The first educational institution designed to assimilate Indians into white, Protestant, American society. Founded in 1817, in Chickamauga, Georgia, the school served as a model for almost all 19th- and early 20th-century schools built by the federal government on Indian reservations.
Named after David Brainerd, an 18th-century Presbyterian missionary to the Seneca and Delaware Indians, the Brainerd Mission was a joint venture of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the U.S. government and the Cherokee Nation. Under the Treaty of Holston in 1791, the federal government had provided funds to the Cherokee to help them convert from a hunting to an agricultural economy. In response to a 1796 invitation by President Washington, about 15,000 to 20,000 Cherokee settled in about 40 villages in a region covering parts of Georgia, Tennessee and the western Carolinas. Although Moravian and Presbyterian missionaries had set up a few elementary religious schools, they were of little practical value in helping the Cherokee become successful farmers. In 1817, the Cherokee sent a delegation to Washington to ask governmental help in providing more advanced education to Cherokee children.
Washington agreed to build a schoolhouse and living facilities for a teacher and to provide plows, hoes, spinning wheels and other equipment to teach children agriculture and the domestic arts. The American board provided teachers, and, within a year, the school not only boasted a schoolhouse and living facilities for teachers, but five student dormitories, a kitchen, dining hall, gristmill, sawmill, barn, stable and 50 acres under cultivation. A fully self-sustaining institution, Brainerd teachers taught exclusively in English and gave each student an English name to replace his or her Indian name. The school used the LANCASTERIAN SYSTEM of instruction, developed by Quaker educator Joseph Lancaster to teach large groups of students by drilling older students in their lessons and assigning the best as monitors to teach younger students. The school day at Brainerd Mission extended from 5:30 A.M. to 9 P.M., with its 180 students either in class or working throughout the day. Boys did manual labor, and girls practiced all the domestic arts. Evenings were spent at prayer or in religious studies. Within 10 years, eight other Brainerd-type schools had arisen among the Cherokees, and, as the Indians were expelled from the East into the western territories, the Brainerd model went with them and remained the standard school for Indians for more than a century thereafter. (See also AMERICAN INDIANS.)