The founding of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School and its longstanding relationship with the Presbyterian Church is both fascinating and inspirational.  Rabun Gap began as two schools: Nacoochee Institute and Rabun Gap Industrial School.  The Institute was established in 1903, in White County, Georgia.  That year, the Reverend Joel Wade, a Presbyterian educational missionary, arrived in the community of Sautee to take over the grammar school and put it on solid footing.  A few years later, the Reverend John Knox Coit became head of the school and helped to develop a rigorous liberal arts curriculum in the classical academic tradition.

Meanwhile, 40 miles to the east in Rabun County, Georgia, Andrew Jackson Ritchie,  the county's first college graduate, who at the time was teaching at Baylor University, had decided to return to the mountains of Georgia to help educate and give hope to the isolated people of this region.  In 1905, on our present campus and near the site of the school he attended as a boy, Ritchie and his wife, Addie Corn Ritchie, established what was then called the Rabun Gap Industrial School.  Students not only attended classes; they also worked the school farm, growing and preparing all their food and maintaining the school's buildings, including their dormitories.

In February 1926, an untimely fire destroyed the Industrial School's main building.   A month later another fire wiped out nearly all the infrastructure of the Nacoochee Institute in White County.  That school also was a farm school for poor boys and girls of the mountain region and was owned and supported by the Presbyterian Synod.  Soon thereafter, the Boards of Trustees of the two schools voted to merge the two institutions and build a larger and stronger school at Rabun Gap.