Jacob Yoder

Jacob Yoder, a Mennonite from Pennsylvania who established Lynchburg’s first Freedmen’s Bureau school for African American children, poses here with a colleague and pupils in the early 1870s.

Courtesy of Samuel Horst and the Lynchburg Public Library

At the end of the 1866 spring term, Jacob Yoder’s pupils held a “Program of Exhibition.” In his diary Jacob Yoder recorded that the event was well attended by the community and was “eminently a success.”

Courtesy of the Library of Virginia and the Lynchburg Public library