An earlier District 1 school in Green Township was established just northeast of where it sits today. In 1880, it was located at the northeastern corner of West County Road 1000-South and Indiana State Road 13 on farmland owned by the Cotterell family¹.

By 1901, it moved to its present location on land owned by Thomas Jenkins Doty, whose surname gave the school its first colloquial name². The present structure seems to have been built in 1909³. 

The school’s common designation of Gravel Lawn came after the adjacent cemetery was established in 1914 after a neighbor named Charles Hiday sold seven acres of his land to a board of trustees⁴.

The District 1: Doty/Gravel Lawn schoolhouse served students until 1930, when Green Township’s Center School opened as a consolidation between District 1 and the District 3 schoolhouse, known as Hardscrabble⁵. 

Located at the southeast corner of West County Road 800-South and IN-13, the Center school closed in 1971. After nearly fifty years of disuse, the building was demolished in 2021. The old District 1 schoolhouse, meanwhile, still stands as a private dwelling.

Sources Cited
1 Kingman Brothers. (1880). History of Madison County, Indiana with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches. Chicago, IL.
2 (1901). Stony Creek Township. An atlas of Madison County, Indiana. map, Cleveland, OH; American Atlas Company. 
3 Madison County Office of Information & GIS Services. (2021). Parcel ID: 48-15-33-400-001.000-014.
4 Crowe, R. (2015, September 3). Gravel Lawn Cemetery marks its centennial. The Greenfield Daily Reporter. p. 20. 
5 Crowe, R. (2015, April 16). One teacher looms large in Center School history. The Greenfield Daily Reporter. p. 20.