Reading time: 5 min.

Every now and then, I start to feel a little too confident in my grasp of local history- at least right up until a stubborn detail comes along and humbles me. That’s exactly what happened recently while I was digging into the schoolhouses of eastern Madison County, Indiana. One unassuming building in the tiny hamlet of Gilman, in particular, reminded me that even familiar places can still hold a few surprises.

I’ve described more than a few old hamlets and villages as “blink-and-you ’ll-miss-it,” but Gilman takes that idea to an extreme. You don’t even have to blink to miss it. It’s that small! That wasn’t always the case, though. Once known as “Business Station¹,” Gilman was platted in the late 1870s after the Lafayette, Muncie & Bloomington Railroad reached the spot in 1875². 

During the early years of the east-central Indiana gas boom, the little railroad town briefly flourished! At its peak, Gilman supported glass plants, a blacksmith shop, an Odd Fellows lodge, a resident doctor, a stockyard, two stores, a church, a school, an elevator and granary, a creamery, a depot, a post office, and even a handful of taverns³.

The community sits just west of the Delaware-Madison County line, but optimism ran so high in the early 1890s that the village briefly dreamed bigger than its borders: during that speculative moment, Gilman was actually platted into neighboring Delaware County! It was a telling sign of just how much faith locals had in its future at the height of the boom.

In reality, Gilman never grew quite that large. By 1901, a map of the town shows a Methodist Episcopal Church, a post office, a sawmill, a blacksmith shop, a general store, and a farmer’s co-op⁴ across ten blocks that ended the county line. It also shows that schoolhouse that stopped me in my tracks. That’s where my certainty began to unravel.

I was sure I had Madison County’s old one-room schools pretty well figured out. I’d poured countless hours into my own research, chased down maps and records, and spent even more time trading notes with the Madison County Historian. I felt confident -maybe a little too confident- that I knew where every one of those long-gone classrooms once stood. Then Gilman came along and proved me wrong. 

I started digging, and before long, I was swimming in references to schools around Gilman. One source pointed to Harrison Township High School nearby, but in Delaware County⁵. Others mentioned the old Tennessee schoolhouse, which served students from Monroe Township’s District 3 until the building burned in 1933⁶. The problem was that none of them lined up with what that 1901 map seemed to be telling me. 

The picture finally began to sharpen as my research deepened. In 1904, local Republicans began meeting at the Gilman schoolhouse- not Tennessee, not Harrison, but one that carried the town’s own name⁷. Then I came across a reminiscence from an old-timer who’d grown up in the area. He remembered a one-room frame school with two cottonwood trees standing guard out front. Remarkably, at least one of those trees was still there as late as 1970⁸! 

I figured that if I could track that tree down, I might still find a living marker of a place that had otherwise nearly slipped from memory. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know a cottonwood tree from a hole in the ground, so I had to take a different approach: I pulled up Gilman on Madison County’s Beacon map and tracked down the town’s original lots. By comparing those to the 1901 plat map, I was able to zero in on where the school once stood. Sure enough, there it was: some kind of tree still planted out front. 

Once I’d pinned down the schoolhouse’s exact location, a whole new set of questions cropped up. Why didn’t it appear on any other plat maps of Gilman, or even Madison County? Why was it built so close to the Tennessee Schoolhouse, just a mile down the road? How had I managed to miss it entirely after more than a decade spent researching the area’s schoolhouses? I clicked and clicked, searched and searched, but the answers refused to surface.

That is, until they did. I finally searched the local papers for “Tennessee Gilman” and came across an article from 1906. “Dr. Thomas sold the school house at Gilman to B.B. Bealmar yesterday,” the snippet read. “The Gilman and Tennessee schools have been consolidated. Thus as the township had no use for the building, Dr. Thomqs, the trustee, sold it⁹.”

Just like that, the mystery snapped into focus. The frame Gilman schoolhouse hadn’t vanished from the record; it had simply lived a shorter life than most, maybe fifteen years. Consolidation erased it pretty quickly, which explains the silence, the proximity to the Tennessee school, and why it slipped past me for so long.

It’s a small story tied to a place so tiny you really can miss it without blinking, but that’s exactly why places like the Gilman schoolhouse matter: the institution existed just long enough to educate a handful of kids, host a few community meetings, and then fade away, but left little more than a line in a newspaper and a stubborn tree out front behind.

For me, it was a reminder that local history isn’t just about the landmarks that endure. It’s also about the ones that disappear early, quietly, and almost completely. Even for someone who’s spent more than a decade researching old schoolhouses nearby, every once in a while, they still sometimes manage to stymie me- if only briefly.

Sources Cited
1 Bock, G. (1970, April 8). Man About Town. The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 4. 
2 McBride, M. (1998, August 3). Gilman is still on track. The Muncie Star Press. p. 7. 
3 (See footnote 2). 
4 Atlas and Directory of Madison County, Indiana (1901). American Atlas Company [Cleveland]. Map. 
5 Farmers Meet At Gilman School (1938, January 15). The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 13. 
6 Advisory Board Meets to Make School Plans (1933, February 10). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 1.
7 Alexandria (1904, October 7). The Anderson Weekly Herald. p. 3. 
8 Bock, G. (1970, March 23). Man About Town. The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 4. 
9 Short Bits of News (1906, December 19). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 8.