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Home to sixty-six people per square mile, Madison County’s Jackson Township is rural. Its population is only a third of Indiana’s average! Nevertheless, the place was home to ten schoolhouses in 1874¹. The total dwindled until the eight-classroom Jackson Township Consolidated School was completed in 1955.

I’m not sure what happened to the tenth, but Jackson Township’s schools from Districts One through Nine eventually became known as Bell Rattle, Business Corner, Neese, Perkinsville, Dyer’s Creek, McClintock, Hamilton, Epperly, and McCord². After all but two of the schools consolidated, students spent their elementary careers at Perkinsville before they moved to the Hamilton schoolhouse for grades six through eight³. Unfortunately, kids were out of luck for high school. If they chose to, students spent grades nine through twelve in Lapel or at Walnut Grove in Hamilton County.

By the time the Jackson Township Consolidated School was built, the schoolhouses at Perkinsville and Hamilton were thought to be the oldest in Madison County⁴. Serving students in grades 1-8, the new school became part of the West-Central School District that combined Jackson, Lafayette, Stony Creek, and part of Pipe Creek Township in 1972⁵.

Twenty-two years later, the school board decided to send the Jackson students to the Lapel and Leach elementary schools and remodel the building into an education center⁶. In 1998, the school district renamed itself as Frankton-Lapel Community Schools and reconfigured the forty-three year old school into its administrative offices⁷.

Sources Cited
1 Harden, S. (1874). History of Madison County, Indiana, from 1820 to 1874. book. Markleville, IN.
2 Bock, G. (1969, August 23). No Kidding, There Was Once Bell Rattle School. The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 4.
3 Perkinsville School To Be Used For Last Year (1954, September 1). The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 19.
4 New Township School Planned (1952, January 22). The Anderson Herald. p. 1.
5 20 Candidates Running for West Central Board. (1972, April 24). The Elwood Call-Leader. p. 1.
6 Jackson school to be used as educational center. (1994, April 19). The Elwood Call-Leader. p. 1.
7 Frankton board approves new name. (1998, March 13). The Elwood Call-Leader. p. 1.