Elementary students have a blast as the holidays approach. I have it on good authority that classrooms glow with decorations while every desk sprouts a craft project. Furthermore, someone rolls a TV in to watch The Polar Express or Prancer, and students are set! Step back more than a century, though, to 1901, and a schoolhouse Christmas looked very different. Still, it was every bit as magical.
In 1901, the schoolhouse that served Center Township’s District 4 in Delaware County came alive with Christmas cheer and treated its students to a full evening of holiday entertainment. “A feature was little 5-year-old Dorothea Wheatley’s alto singing,” the newspaper said, while “Professor Garret’s junior orchestra furnished the music. Santa Claus left a treat of candy, peanuts, and oranges1.”
The District 4 schoolhouse was known as Hazel College in a nod to the bushes that surrounded the building2. An earlier school preceded it3, but the structure in which students celebrated in 1901 was dedicated on November 26, 1879, with what newspapers proudly called a “splendid programme4.” Hazel College stood at what’s now the northwest corner of West Jackson Street and Tillotson Avenue in Muncie, now home to a Speedway5.
After thirty years of service, Hazel College was retired in 1909 when Center Township officials opened the new Whittier School to replace it along with the old District 15 West Side school6. The story could have ended there, but Hazel College was luckier than most: instead of being torn down, it found a second life when Mrs. Warren C. Emerson purchased the building, expanded it, and remodeled the old school into a home next to the day school she operated7.
Hazel College stood at least through the late 1960s8. Blurry aerial photos up through 1967 confirm its existence, but I’ve only ever seen a single image of the schoolhouse in its prime, a grainy image shared in the newspaper more than forty years after it closed.
Passing that busy corner today, it’s hard to imagine the laughter, music, and candlelit excitement that once filled Hazel College’s rural brick walls. So much has changed -schoolhouses, neighborhoods, even the very ground where Hazel College stood- but the heart of a country school Christmas has endured.
Sources Cited
1 Christmas In A Country School (1901, December 21). The Muncie Morning Star. p. 5.
2 Greene, D. (1941, October 3). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
3 Kingman, A.L. (1874). Map of Delaware County, Indiana : from recent & original surveys, made expressly for this map, drawn, compiled and published by A.L. Kingman and assistants. map, Chicago, IL; A.L. Kingman.
4 Free Concert (1879, November 18). The Muncie Morning News. p. 2.
5 Griffing, B. N. (1887). Center Township. An atlas of Delaware County, Indiana. map, Philadelphia, PA; Griffing, Gordon, & Company.
6 Sewer Contract Let (1908, May 13). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 5.
7 Greene, D. (1947, February 10). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
8 Greene, D. (1969, April 11). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
