My mom and I found ourselves deep in southern Indiana on a recent adventure tracking down old Long Line towers. That’s where we stumbled across an old consolidated school at of Cass-Union Road and Highway 262 right in the heart of Ohio County. I try to stay focused during my research trips, but I couldn’t resist snapping a photo and diving into the building’s story! Here’s what I found.
Ohio County was one of the last to be established in Indiana. Nearly two-hundred years later, it’s the state’s smallest county both by population and area1. I assumed that the road we found the school on, Cass-Union, connected those two townships, and I was right! The school sits in the upper-northeastern corner of Cass.
Built between 1940 and 1941, the building was the result of efforts to combine the one-room schools of Cass and Union Township. Initially, the student body featured a hundred and forty students, including kids from Halls Mills in Randolph Township2.
As originally designed, the $40,000 Cass-Union school featured four classrooms, an office and library, and a full basement with a stage, kitchen, and extra room for toilets in the future. Twenty-nine local WPS workers were employed during the school’s construction3.
Apparently, students from the consolidated Freedom School near Bear Branch in Pike Township were sent to Cass-Union in 19644. Unfortunately, the arrangement wasn’t to last- eight years later, a new countywide elementary school opened in Rising Sun5. With broken windows and derelict vehicles nearby, the old Cass-Union school building appears to be abandoned today.
Sources Cited
1 Ohio County QuickFacts (n.d.). United States Census Bureau [Washington, D.C.]. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
2 Cass-Union Consolidated School (2023, May 8). The Historical Marker Database. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
3 Uhlmansiek, M. (2018, July 11). 78 YEARS AGO. The Rising Sun Weekly. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
4 Ohio County Indiana Schools (n.d.). Indiana Genealogy Trails. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
5 Cass-Union (2017, July 13). The Rising Sun Weekly. Web. Retrieved September 6, 2024.
