Read time: 5 min.

I spend a lot of time digging into the history of old schools. Over the past few years, Google Maps and Google Earth have become some of my most powerful tools! It’s amazing what you can find just by zooming into the middle of a rural township, and that’s how I stumbled onto Shelby County’s Moral Township School. Years of archived satellite images tell its story as the building proudly stood, slowly crumbled, and eventually gave way to the landscape that once surrounded it. 

Moral Township makes up the northwest corner of Shelby County. If you’ve ever driven from Indianapolis to Cincinnati on I-74 as I have, you’ve been there too. In 1916, the area was home to at least nine rural schoolhouses scattered across the countryside¹. That all changed in 1923², when a new consolidated school rose on the site of the old District 5 building at the township’s center³. 

Instead of designing a rectangular block like many schools of that day and age, whoever drew up plans for Moral Township’s consolidated school chose a different path. As best I can tell, the building featured four single-story blocks of classrooms and offices shaped like a U. A gymnasium with a peaked roof and power plant jutted back from the arched entryway, and another segment of classrooms completed the circuit around two courtyards.

This aerial image dates to 1956, when Moral Township was in full swing as a high school. I paid ten bucks for this photo from Historic Aerials, so thanks to the last three people who bought me a coffee! In 1958, Moral Township consolidated with Boggstown and Fairland to create Northwestern Consolidated School Corporation’s Triton Central High School⁴. Moral Township was repurposed to serve as Triton North Elementary, but closed sometime before 1976⁵. It was sold in 1985⁶. 

I missed the Moral Township school entirely. I never went there, never knew anyone who went there, and never even ever saw it in person. The closest I’ve come is this aerial image, taken in 1998 when I was seven or eight. It’s grainy and hard to make out, but appears to show most of the building’s roof missing. As for the gym? It’s hard to say.

I first found aerial imagery of the Moral Township School around 2014 or so. Back then, I used Bing Maps as my favorite provider since it briefly offered a 3/4 “bird’s-eye” view that provided more detail than a full-on aerial. An image from 2005 appeared to show most of the building gone aside from the trusses of its gym! Google captured a similar image, but from directly above. 

I haven’t been able to find a solid source, but years ago, I swear I read that the old school burned sometime after it closed. Whether it was flames, a bulldozer, or just the slow wear of time, the result was the same. By 2010, all that remained was its footprint, a faint outline of a place where a community once gathered.

By 2014, not much had changed aside from new growth creeping in. It was tough to tell in the earlier image, but it looked like a piece of the school’s northwestern corner might have survived as an outbuilding. Curious, I dug into Shelby County’s assessor records and found listings for a utility shed and a detached garage at the six-acre school site⁷. Could they be remnants of the original building? I’d like to think a small piece of the past is still holding on.

The last image I’m sharing is from 2025. It’s an overgrown scene almost unrecognizable from the school that once stood there. Trees have grown tall where students used to gather, and a thick mix of bushes, shrubs, and tangled undergrowth has taken over the grounds. Nature doesn’t just reclaim places like this, it erases them slowly and gently until only those who remember ever know something was there at all.

Over the past decade, I’ve watched the Moral Township School slowly fade, frame by frame, through satellite images. It’s almost like I witnessed the building take its final breaths! Even through a screen, the story the satellite images told was powerful. Now you know it, too. 

Sources Cited
1 Map of Shelby County, Indiana (1916). Kenyon Company [Des Moines]. Map. 
2 Aerial view of Moral Township School, Moral Township, Indiana, circa 1940 (1940). American Sky Views [Chicago]. The Indiana Album. Web. Retrieved May 18, 2025. 
3 (See footnote 1). 
4 Grade 3 at Moral Township School, Shelby County, Indiana, 1929 (1929). Anne Hardwick Family Collection. Indiana Memory. Web. Retrieved May 18, 2025. 
5 Gaines, B. (2014, September 24). Pre-consolidation schools hold stories, memories. The Greenfield Daily Reporter. p. 18. 
6 Skvarenina, J. (2015, April 24). Former school’s history lives on. The Greenfield Daily Reporter. Web. Retriebed May 18, 2025. 
7 Parcel 73-02-19-200-006.000-013 (2025). Shelby County Assessor’s Office [Shelbyville]. Web. Retrieved May 19, 2025.