Schools & Teachers

THE OLD-TIME SCHOOL MASTER.

As early as 1720 the French traders had established a trading post at Thorntown, being one of the system of posts extending from the valley of the St. Lawrence to that of the Lower Mississippi. In 1800, it is said, the town included thirty-six trading houses or stores, and was the home of a branch of the Miami Indians. The white population up to this time seems to have included only males, and no attempt was made to establish a society or to found schools and churches.

In 1828, when the Indians sold their reservation of Thorntown to the Government, the entire population, French as well as Indian, abandoned the place and the new town of Thorntown, laid out in 1830, was located upon the west or opposite side of Prairie Creek from the site of the old town. It may be said then that the first Anglo-Saxon settlement was that of the McCord brothers, who settled east of the present site of Zionsville, in 1821. Other settlers came in each year and about 1826 the first school in the county was organized in an abandoned cabin on the east bank of Eagle Creek near the Marion County line and about one and a half miles south of the site of Zionsville.

In 1832 a school house was built on the farm of William Beelar, in Eagle Township, and about the same time a log school house was built in the new town of Thorntown, and Jefferson Hillis was engaged as teacher at the latter point. These two were the first houses erected, built especially for school purposes, within the county. The same year the first school in Washington Township was taught by Daniel Ellis, in a deserted settler’s cabin, on the south bank of Sugar Creek just a few rods south of the subsequent site of the Chase or Ben Crose mill. In this same winter of 1832, the first school in Marion Township was taught in a cabin on the farm of John Pan, just north of Big Springs. It was not till 1836 that the first public school house was built in Marion Township, being situated upon the farm of John Wright, not far from the present site of School No. 2. Within these years, from 1832 to 1837, private schools were carried on in all the new settlements. In Jefferson and Union townships as early as 1833, and in the southwest part of Jackson Township in 1835, schools had been established, and rudimentary instruction was given pupils who came through the tangled forests and swampy by-ways to gain what knowledge was then opened to them. All of the schools in the county were at this time carried on by subscription on the settlers who, from their scanty means cheerfully gave, and, each in turn, boarded the teacher for the sake of giving their children a measure of preparation for the wider range of duties to devolve upon them with the development of the country.

In 1835 the first school in Clinton Township had been established in a deserted cabin in the Mud Creek settlement, northwest of Elizaville, with J. H. Sample as teacher. The following year witnessed the first school in Perry Township, being in a cabin in the northwestern part of the township. In the year 1837 the first school in Worth Township, and probably the first free school in the county, was taught in a cabin on the farm of James McCord, the teacher being Henry Lucas, and the teacher being paid by the county. In the autumn of this same year a subscription school of two or three months’ duration was taught by Pleasant Crawford in Harrison Township. This was the first school taught in that township. From this time on the growth of the schools in the county kept pace with that of the population. In 1824 the legislature had enacted a law to establish school houses, of which two provisions were as follows:

Sec. 6. Each able-bodied male person of the age of twenty-one or upwards, being freeholder or householder, residing in the district, shall be liable equally to work one day in each week until such building may be completed, or pay the sum of thirty-seven and one-half cents for every day he may so fail to work, and provided, moreover, that the said trustees shall always be bound to receive at cash price, in lieu of any such labor or money as aforesaid, any plank, nails, glass, or other materials which may be needed about such building.

Sec. 7. That in all such cases such school house shall be eight feet between the floors, and at least one foot from the surface of the ground to the first floor, and finished in a manner calculated to render comfortable the teacher, pupils, etc.

Under this law school houses were rapidly constructed all over the state, the great majority of such houses being built of hewed logs with puncheon floors and capacious fireplaces and chimneys. The seats were without backs; the writing desk or table was made of puncheons resting upon wooden pins driven into the walls and extending along two or three sides of the room. The teacher’s whips were laid upon two long pins above the teacher’s desk. The public schools under the old constitution depended entirely upon the income from the congressional fund, no tuition tax being provided for by law. From eight to twelve weeks usually exhausted the public money. In a majority of cases the term was extended several weeks by subscription upon the part of the patrons of the district. The early teachers were generally Yankee, Irish, or Scotch, with an occasional Quaker from North Carolina. For a long time there were no public examinations to determine the fitness of teachers other than the local school directors and the patrons at large. An indispensable requisite was the ability and disposition to make a vigorous use of the beech and hazel rods that lay above the teacher’s desk. Add to this the ability to do “the sum” in Pike’s Arithmetic through “Tare and Tret,” to spell through the old Elementary and to read loud and rapidly and he was fully equipped for his manifold duties! Most of the teachers uniformly “skipped the fractions” in arithmetic. It is related that one or two of the earlier teachers in the county attempted to teach the spherical shape of the earth, and even asserted that it was as cold at the south pole as at the north pole! For these ignorant and blasphemous teachings more than one pioneer teacher was promptly dismissed. Their notions of geography were not orthodox, for how could the earth have “four corners” if these things were true? But a better class of teachers soon came into the new county from New England, the Middle States and Kentucky. Many men who have since led their profession in our state, came into the state as pioneer teachers from 1835 to 1850. The county seminaries, designed as stepping-stones from the district school to the State University, were being rapidly established on the different county seats of the state, and about 1840 the old Boone County Seminary was begun on the east side of Lebanon. The building was finished in 1843, and that autumn the first school within it was taught by Stephen Neal, Esq., who is still a resident of Lebanon. Mr. Neal was succeeded in 1844 by John M. Patton, late cashier of the Thorntown national bank. The county seminary continued to flourish during a period of ten years, until the adoption of the new constitution in 1852, when, like most of the seminaries in the state, it was sold at public sale. It brought the county school fund the sum of $900, and was converted into a hotel or boarding house, for which it is still used, known as the Pleasant Grove, or Bray House.

Among other early teachers of Boone County we may mention a Mr. Schenck, a German, who taught the second school in Perry Township in 1837; Mr. W. L. McCormick, who first taught in the county in 1842, teaching a public school in an old log house a mile and a half east of New Brunswick, in Harrison Township. Since that time Mr. McCormick has, with the exception of one or two winters, taught every year, keeping pace with the rapid advancement of the school system. For many years he has kept his place as the oldest teacher in the county. Among the early teachers at Thorntown were numbered Rufus A. Lockwood, afterward famous as a brilliant and eccentric lawyer, the winner of the famous Mariposa gold mine suit in California, and who went down in the Atlantic with the ill-fated Central America, and Rev. Bird, a Presbyterian minister, who established a school at Thorntown about 1840, which attracted many pupils; Andrew J. Boone, Joseph Sample, Isaac and Robert Carmack, Rev. Philander Anderson, David Burns and others became widely known over the county as teachers within the two decades from 1840 to 1850. In 1855 the Thorntown Academy was established under the charge of the Northwest M. E. Conference. Among its principals may be cited Rev. Tarr, Hon. O. H. Smith, Republican candidate for Superintendent, in 1878; Prof. J. C. Ridpath, the historian and literateur; Prof. Sims, now Chancellor of Syracuse University, New York; Profs. Osborn, Rouse and others who have been widely known as educational workers. This school flourished for about seventeen years, at the end of which time it was sold and converted into a public high school. In 1860 the Presbyterian Church began the erection of an academy in Lebanon. The first school was taught in the new building in 1862, under the charge of Prof. Naylor. The school continued to prosper for some ten year when it was sold to the town and converted into a public high school, for which purpose it is still used. Upon the conversion of the academy into a public school the three district schools, which had long been maintained in Lebanon, were abolished. The meagerness of the county school records afford but few statistics of the steady progress of the public schools; but each year the enumeration and enrollment increased and the facilities of every kind were extended. But two or three isolated school ma’ams had been known in the county previous to the breaking out of the civil war; and it seemed to have been a matter of general astonishment when the necessary employment of women proved that in many cases, at least, the school ma’am could surpass the schoolmaster in the efficiency of her work and the beneficence of her influence. For the year 1886-87 there are employed in the schools of Boone County fifty-four female and 106 male teachers.

Until a few years ago there was still in use, near the Harrison and Perry Township line, an old-time school house; known popularly as “Cornbread College.” In fact, it still stands, and is used as a wood house for No. 9, Harrison Township. This was the last of the old-time log school houses with its two logs cut out for windows, its puncheon floor and monster chimney. From hewed log to frame, and from frame to brick has been the transition. There are now in Boone County 135 school buildings, of which thirty-six are frame and ninety-nine brick. The total value of buildings and furnishings exceeds $200,000.

Of the town school buildings, that of Jamestown was erected in 1873, at a cost of $12,000. It is a very spacious and well-located building. That of Zionsville was erected soon afterwards and is a handsome edifice, and its site, upon an eminence at the west side of town, is unsurpassed in the state. In 1883 the Thorntown High School was erected, at a cost of about $15,000. It is probably the best school building possessed by a town of the size of Thorntown in the state. It is commodious in its arrangement and beautiful in its proportions and its finish. Within the past year the city of Lebanon has built a neat ward school building, and it is the expectation that a new high school building that will honor the county seat will be erected in the near future. Certain it is, that no railway or other enterprise can ever bring to a town the prosperity and development that such a school must insure.

There were enumerated in Boone County in the year of 1886, a school population of 7,980, of which number 5,098 were males and 4,862 females. Of this number about 7,700 are enrolled as pupils in the public schools, with an average daily attendance of about 5,000. The total school revenues of the county for the years 1885-86 were $99,882.15, of which $65,732.81 was special school revenue.

The length of the schools have, within the past few years, varied widely in the different townships, ranging from eight months in Sugar Creek to four months in Perry.

The school and township libraries of the county number 1,500 volumes. The apparatus for purposes of illustration is valued at $5,200.

A uniform course of study, divided into five grades, is followed in all the schools of the county, and notwithstanding the many drawbacks of irregular attendance, insufficient supply of text-books, indifference of parents, etc., rapid progress is making toward such a system of classification and work as will secure, it is hoped, the best ultimate results, and enable pupils moving from one school to another to pursue their studies without the loss of time or change of work.

The common schools are the people’s colleges, and looking back over the progress of the half century past, and then to the unlimited possibilities of the future, it is easy to believe that the fondest dreams of their founders will be more than realized.

Source Citation: Boone County History [database online] Boone County INGenWeb. 2007. <http://www.rootsweb.com/~inboone> Original data: Harden & Spahr. "Early life and times in Boone County, Indiana." Lebanon, Indiana. May, 1887, pp. 137-143.

Transcribed by: Julie S. Townsend - July 10, 2007