Back in 2022, I found what I thought might be Hamilton County’s old Bakers Corner schoolhouse. I was never fully convinced, though, and even wrote a post about my lingering doubts. The problem was that the post wasn’t very good and the photo I grabbed of the building was downright awful, so I kept kicking it down the road. Then, yesterday morning, I finally uncovered proof that the building really was the schoolhouse! As luck would have it, I happened to drive past it later that same day.

I used to think my quest to visit every Indiana courthouse and every nearby schoolhouse was sort of unhinged, but then there’s my friend Brett: he’s on a mission to see every high school gym, past and present! Brett’s as sharp as they come, but now and then he runs into a head-scratcher and calls me in to try and help. The latest mystery was Warrick County’s Tennyson Elementary.

Some buildings don’t just sit in one place and wait for history to happen: they evolve and somehow find a reason to stick around. Marshall County’s old infirmary is one of those places! Over the years, it’s been rebuilt, relocated, partially demolished, and repurposed, but it’s never quite disappeared. Today, much of the landmark still stands. 

Yesterday’s post about the hopeful restoration of the old Corinth schoolhouse sent me down a tangent I’d like to explore a little further. Various sources describe Corinth as Delaware County’s last brick schoolhouse¹; the county’s only surviving school from before 1878, bizarrely²; or “one of the few remaining structures of its kind³.” I’m sure those claims were made in good faith, but they simply aren’t true. More importantly, they overshadow the myriad surviving schoolhouses scattered across Delaware County. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of those forgotten survivors. Even if they can’t be realistically restored like Corinth, they at least deserve some attention.

Indiana’s dotted with hundreds of old one-room schools, and Delaware County is no exception. Of all of them, though, the best-preserved is undoubtedly Monroe Township’s old District 3 school, better known as Corinth. A newly-formed group aims to restore the historic building and return the old schoolhouse to its former glory.