The History of Sunset Gap - page 3
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As a career teacher in
the mission program of the Presbyterian Church, Sara Cochrane
might well have listed the spiritual side of the work in her community
as coming first.
She realized early that other churches were firmly established, and she never considered building a Presbyterian Church. Sensitive to the important place of religion in community homes, she instead encouraged people to attend their own church. For those without a church, she held Sunday school services at Sunset Gap. Each year in reports to the Board of Missions, she affirmed two goals for Sunset Gap. First, that of setting an example of Christian care and concern; and second, the training of Christian leaders for the community. Perhaps Sara Cochran's most determined work relating to the larger community was in the area of health care. In the school's first year, she found that over 50% of the children were tubercular, or nearly so. By 1928, she had a clinic built to combat this and other illnesses, which so drained the energy of her students. She arranged the daily schedule and even the yearly calendar to best affect the health of the school children and the welfare of the community. |
The
older children came to school from July, after the crops were planted,
'til the spring of the next year. Younger children, in the first
three grades, came to school from late March 'til muddy roads and
chilly winds started in November. By grades, they were bathed, given cod-liver oil, and put to bed for a nap each day at school. (She later credited a man from Pennsylvania for the success of this program of care. He shipped case after case of cod liver oil to her with each bottle brightly labeled as Sunshine Medicine.) The day's classes worked around this ritual, which was supplemented by a hot lunch program and recreation period. Each summer Miss Cochrane enlisted the help of the Sevier County Public Health Department in establishing special clinics to fight a particular illness. The first clinic, in 1925, concentrated on typhoid fever. The following summer the clinic initiated a community wide inoculation program against typhoid and diphtheria. Another summer saw the clinic specialize in tonsillectomies. For almost two years during the late twenties, a nurse was in permanent residence at Sunset Gap's new clinic building making it an outpost hospital. |
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