I’ve been surprised and humbled by the amount of people who have told me they use this blog to help with their own research. A few mentioned that they wished there was an easier way to find my schoolhouse posts since there are so many of them! A simple index I rolled out last week should help with those requests and streamline things.

I was exposed to one-room schoolhouses when I was twelve or thirteen and found them immensely compelling. I started taking photos of Delaware County’s in 2014 and revisited the project during the pandemic after I passed two in Blackford County on the way to get my first shot. Now, a few years later, I’m pretty sure I ended up finding all of them in Blackford, Delaware, Madison, and Randolph Counties. I researched their histories and wrote about the 156 I took photos of on an old blog.

Last September, I decided to discontinue all of my blogs, including the schoolhouse one, in favor of this website. As I write this, I’ve been to nearly 250 schoolhouses in Adams, Blackford, Delaware, Hamilton, Hancock, Henry, Jay, Madison, Randolph, and Wayne counties. I haven’t been to all of the old schoolhouses in East-Central Indiana, but I’m pretty close.

The new schoolhouse index page compiles every one I’ve written about here into an easily-navigable dropdown menu for anyone interested in those buildings. Every time I publish a new schoolhouse post, the schoolhouse index will receive an update that links to it. The index won’t be complete until I get through posting about all of the buildings I’ve been to.

I’d have liked to flood this blog as a database, but I decided to schedule posts out instead. Because of that, some schoolhouses I’ve researched won’t appear on the index until I’ve actually posted about them. If you’re a a researcher looking for information about an extant schoolhouse from my old blog that I haven’t posted about here yet, let me know. I’d be happy to fill you in or let a scheduled post about it cut the line.