A couple of years back, I shared some tips on how to spot old schoolhouses from the road. They were quick tricks for anyone cruising the backroads with an eye for history, and most of them hold up! Unfortunately, Jackson Township’s District 4 schoolhouse in Blackford County breaks all the rules. It took some serious sleuthing to track the old building down.
Back in 1905, the Jackson Townsihp’s District 4 school, known as Barr, stood on ten acres of land owned by the Barnhart family. Eighty-three acres across the road owned by C.W. and A.L. Barr probably gave the institution its colloquial name1.
The extant building was probably built in the 1890s, when schoolhouse designs shifted towards a T-shape with cloakrooms that flanked a central entrance. I’m not sure when it closed, but the first reunion of the “old” Barr School was held in Hartford City’s Hoover Park in 19362. That’s where the mystery starts: after its closure, the building was purchased by James Mannix, moved a half mile north, and remodeled into a modern farmhouse3.
Before I knew its history, I thought the Barr schoolhouse had been demolished. Once I found out it’d been moved, the gears in my head started turning. I began looking at property records of homes half a mile north of the school’s original site to see if a Mannix still owned it. One didn’t, but I found a parcel that a member of the family had transferred to a new owner. Once I zoomed in, I found satellite images that confirmed that the home I found followed the T-shaped schoolhouse plan.
Normally, a relocated schoolhouse -especially a T-shaped one- is easy to spot. Barr’s is tricky, though. Its original entryway, the ascender of the T, sits back from the road. The building was rotated! At some point in time, the home received expansions to its north and south, as well as the addition of a second story inside its tall classroom.
I was thrilled to add another old schoolhouse to my collection, but tracking this one down reminded me that not every piece of history wants to be found. The old Barr schoolhouse did its best to stay hidden, but its bones tell the story. In those cases, the thrill is in uncovering the puzzle pieces that prove the building never really disappeared at all.
Sources Cited
1 Hixson, W.W. (1905). Blackford County, Ind. map. Map Collection, Indiana Division, Indiana State Library.
2 Reunion Officers Named (1936, September 8). The Muncie Star. p. 3.
3 Hartford City (1942, September 4). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 2.
TIL that Mannix is a legit last name and not one made up to sound cool in a ’70s crime drama.
Now you know!