It is the purpose of this thesis to develop the design of a civic and recreation center for Pulaski County, Virginia, which will to the best or the author's ability satisfy two major requirements. The first requirement is that the building shall fulfill the specific needs of the citizens of Pulaski County in providing them with the facilities to carry on those recreational, social, cultural, and civic activities which a.re so necessary for their individual well being and so necessary for making Pulaski a more progressive, a more enjoyable, and a healthier county in which to live. In order to evolve the plans for a building that will fulfill this requirement, it was necessary for the author to go out into Pulaski County and meet the people for whom he was designing. Only by such a method could the author hope to integrate his planning with the tempo and patterns or their daily lives. In the following section the citizens of Pulaski will be introduced to the reader as the author came to know them, to know their general characteristics, their interests, their present needs, and their future dreams. The second requirement is that through a synthesis of the function, the structure, and the aesthetic qualities of the building, it will reflect the noble character of the Pulaski Perpetual Endowment Fund project and will serve as an inspirational memorial to those citizens who, by their contributions, will make the project a success. / Master of Science

The purpose of this study was to observe the manner in which a certain small rural elementary school was affected by being consolidated with several other small rural schools to form a consolidated unit f,or a given school district. This study was focused upon three areas. First, the study had particular regard for the comparison of reading achievement for a certain group of students both before and after consolidation. Secondly, there was a comparison of the attendance of the students before and after consolidation. Lastly, the opinion of the parents of these students was surveyed to determine their feelings regarding the consolidation. The study revealed the following: The data showed, first of all, that there was significant change in the area of reading achievement. Thus, it appeared that consolidation had brought some improvement in the area of reading achievement. In the second area of pupil attendance a slight improvement was noted. This may have been, perhaps, the result of the transportation system which implemented the consolidation. Thirdly, concerning the opinions of parents in relation to their consolidated school, the survey produced information which indicated that the parents of the school were happy with the consolidation. / M.S.

It has been the purpose of this study to determine the medical care needs among rural Pulaski County folks in relation to tenure, land class, and occupations which are indicative of income, age and sex, schooling of the homemaking, size of family or household, distance from medical personnel and facilities, and loss of income through absenteeism from wrong because of illness. The expenditures for six types of medical care and health insurance were also studied in relation to the factors above. / M.S.

Broken-formations (Hsu, 1974; Harris and Milici, 1977) occur in the lower part of the Pulaski thrust sheet and contain some of the most strongly deformed sedimentary rocks in the Valley and Ridge province of the southern Appalachians. Deformation in this zone ranges from grain-scale cataclasis to regional-scale faulting. The broken-formations are distinguished from rocks structurally higher on the sheet and from rocks of the underlying Saltville sheet by (1) a sharp increase in the variability of fold and fault styles, (2) greater ranges in fold plunges and dips of axial surfaces, (3) a low degree of preferred orientation of folds and faults, (4) an increase in the frequency of mesoscopic structures, and (5) the presence of Max Meadows tectonic breccia. Structural analyses indicate that deformation in the broken-formations is Alleghanian in age and that the deformed zone formed under elastico-frictional conditions, possibly under elevated fluid pressures with temporally variant stresses and that lithology may have played an important role in localizing the broken-formations along the base of the Pulaski sheet. / Ph. D.

The conclusion of this investigation, based on field mapping and measured sections, is the Price Formation was deposited on a high-energy shoreline. Sediments for the shoreline were initially transported from a northern deltaic source. The Cloyd Conglomerate Member represents offshore barrier bars, while the Lower Price unit was deposited in a lagoon behind the bars. At the top of the Lower Price unit, the "marker bed" sandstone includes sedimentary features of marine and fluvial origin. This sandstone is interpreted as a delta-front sand, reworked from distributary mouth bars. The Langhorn and Merrimac coal seams were deposited in swamps formed across the sandstone. / Master of Science

The present educational status of Pulaski County has evolved through more than a century of slow progress. The causes back of the goals gained, whether they be natural consequences as in "the winning of the west," or the result of a brilliant stroke of genius on the part of some indomitable leadership, it is not the purpose of this study to determine. The purpose may be stated thus: (1) To preserve some rare materials in peril of passing into oblivion, such as primitive reports, given by the first trustees, pioneers of the primeval districts; the first notice issued by the commissioners to hold an election; a certificate nearly a century old, and some interesting material found in newspapers; and some verbal accounts. (2) To list and give the date of every commissioner and superintendent who has served as the head of the educational system of the county. (3) To make a record of the epistolary reports of the county superintendents of the different years, since they shed much light on the educational problems of their time. Since the geography of a country has much to do with the economical and social life of a people, and since all are factors in an educational program, the geographical features of the county have been included. An account of the historical background has seemed pertinent to an understanding of the peoples. The Academy Lands have been the most obscure chapter of this work. So far no source material in the form of records is available on the Somerset Academy. So far as known, there has been no written history of education in Pulaski County. The only things that approach it are some articles written by members of the D.A.R., by the Chautauqua Clubs, and by Enos Swain. A brief account of Pulaski County is given in Collins's History. Use has been made of some of this material. Clarice Payne Ramey has written a history of the county, but the writer has not had access to it.

The Big Walker Mountain-Crockett Cove area lies in the Valley and Ridge province of southwestern Virginia and is made up of Middle Cambrian-Lower Mississippian strata which are exposed in two separate northeast-trending strike belts. The area is bounded on the northwest by the northwestern limb of the Greendale syncline which has been overridden from the southeast by rocks of the Saltville block. The northeast-trending Saltville thrust probably dips less than 25° in the area near Bland, Virginia, where Middle Ordovician rocks are exposed in a fenster. The rocks exposed in the fenster are probably part of the northwest limb or near-trough portion of the Greendale syncline. The major structure of the Saltville block is the walker Mountain homocline which has subsidiary folds that plunge eastward into a much larger structure - the Blacksburg synclinorium - which is located just east of the area studied. The Saltville block is broken at its southern limit in most of the area by the Tract Mountain reverse fault which essentially parallels the trace of the Saltville fault. Stratigraphic displacement along the Tract Mountain fault decreases from a maximum of about 8,000 feet near its southwestern terminus where the Pulaski block overrides it from the south,to less than 1,000 feet nearly 18 miles away at the eastern border of the area studied. The Tract Mountain block, which is bounded on the northwest by the Tract Mountain fault, is made up of a series of northeast-trending folds which plunge eastward toward the Blacksburg synclinorium. Mapping of the Tract Mountain block and stratigraphic studies of two of its larger folds, the Crockett Cove anticline and the adjacent Queens Knob syncline, show that there is no appreciable thickness or lithologic change in Middle Cambrian-Lower Ordovician rocks between syncline and anticline. However, the basal Champlainian Series in the more southern fold, the Queens Knob syncline, has an aggregate thickness of about 4,400 feet, whereas the same interval near the crest of the Crockett Cove anticline is less than 2,000 feet thick. Most of the beds present near the trough of the syncline are markedly more clastic and less pure than the corresponding beds on the crest of the adjacent anticline which is less than 2.5 miles up structure to the north. Based on this evidence, it is concluded that the present structural axes are identical to axes of maximum and minimum differential subsidence of the sea floor during Middle Ordovician-Late Silurian time. The synclinal trough was the site of maximum subsidence and the anticlinal axis was the site of minimum subsidence. The date of inception of these two folds must correspond to the beginning of pronounced vertical movement of the sea floor which started in early Champlainian time. The anticline which must have at one time lay adjacent to and southeast of the Queens Knob syncline was probably eliminated as a large fault slice during movement along the Pulaski fault that strikes obliquely across the axis of the Queens Knob syncline, which is the southernmost structural element of the Tract Mountain block. The leading edge of the Pulaski block forms the southern border of the Big walker Mountain-Crockett Cove area.which contains approximately 160 square miles that was mapped on a scale of 2 inches to the mile. / Ph. D.