In 1880, the Van Buren Township District 2 schoolhouse was located just west of the C.W. & M. Railroad (Kingman, 1880), now the Norfolk Southern line, on the Mastic farm. That year, a Zion church sat immediately to the schoolhouse’s east¹.

The brick building that still stands appears to have been built in 1899². Ten years later, the bulk of Van Buren Township’s schools proposed a plan to consolidate into Summitville’s District 3 Oak Grove School³. That year, the District 2 school, known as White Hall⁴, was still in operation.

By 1920, only the Oak Grove, North Summitville, and Harmony schools were still in existence, the remainder having consolidated⁵.

In 1929, a family from Fairmount, on their way home, saw a meteor the size of a car crash to earth half a mile north of the White Hall school⁶. Families driving past today are met with less drama: My parents drove by it one day a couple of years ago, before I started cataloging the schoolhouses of Madison Township. It shocked me I didn’t know of this one!

Today, the old schoolhouse appears to be used for agricultural storage. It’s the only remaining one-room schoolhouse in Van Buren Township.

Sources Cited
1 Kingman Brothers. (1880). History of Madison County, Indiana with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches. Chicago, IL.
2 Madison County Office of Information & GIS Services. (2021). Parcel ID: 2021 48-01-17-100-006.000-036.
3 May Combine Schools. (1909, July 15). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 4.
4 Jackson, S. T. (2021, August 13). Madison County schoolhouses. email.
5 Enrollment at Oak Grove Breaks Record. (1921, September 17). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 4.
6Vetor Family Saw a Meteor Fall to Earth (1929, July 27). The Alexandria Times- Tribune. p. 1.