Former head of Gaston Day School talks about community, publishes essays

Over the summer of 2023, Richard Rankin retired from his position as the head of Gaston Day School.

In both his position at the school and in his childhood growing up in Gaston County, Rankin developed a strong sense of belonging and connection to the community, he said.

In his retirement Rankin has taken an opportunity to describe his connection to the Rankin family property and Gaston County in a collection of essays that was recently published by Mercer University Press.

“The desire to belong to a place grows out of a deep yearning to feel at home in the world and to find a particular location where that feeling is best satisfied,” said a press release about the book.

"My relationship with the Rankin homeplace grows out of faith, which for me is a mainline, progressive Protestant Christianity," Rankin said in the release. "I believe the Creator unites and sustains everything in an intricate, infinitely complex natural order, full of beauty and bounty. But creation also suffers from human deceit, greed and predation. In response, belonging to family land necessarily involves stewardship and agency. That means working to protect the natural world and its creatures, repairing them when they are harmed or hurt, and grieving their losses. It also means looking for wildflowers, eating hand-picked blackberries each spring, and experiencing a host of other simple pleasures. Joys and consolations abound when living in a familiar place."

Rankin added that his connection to the community at large was not one he thought about much until his adult life.

“Growing up I wasn’t even aware of it, you know, my father was the family doctor in Mount Holly. So, I don’t know that I even thought about it. I was just growing up in a family. It's as I’ve gotten older that I became more aware of just how well connected, really through my parents, I was to the community,” he said. “Particularly in Mount Holly, my family had a joke. We called my dad’s friendships the ‘Mount Holly Mafia.’ He just knew everybody, so if there was anything that you needed done, you’d just ask my father and he would know somebody that did it, or know somebody that knew somebody.”

In his 22 years at Gaston Day School, Rankin had the opportunity to meet and engage with even more community members.

During this time he did more volunteer work than he is currently working on in his retirement and wrote a similar amount.

He started with historical writing due to his history education background, but found that people seemed to like his writing style and eventually branched out to other topics, he said.

Most recently “Local Signs and Wonders, Essays About Belonging to a Place,” came together and was published.

The book is available online but will also be available in the Gaston County Library, according to Rankin.

This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Former head of Gaston Day School talks about community