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Yesterday, I posted about a building at 3604 East Jackson Street in Muncie that someone told me was an old schoolhouse. I had my doubts since I’d never come across it in years of digging through local history, but a fortunate tip from reader gregandbirds strongly suggested I may have been wrong.

Muncie occupies most of Delaware County’s Center Township. That makes tracking down its early rural schools a little trickier than in the surrounding countryside. Still, plat maps from 1874, 1887, 1900, and 1921 are remarkably consistent when it comes to marking Center Township’s schools. If you wanted, I could tell you where all of them stood.

That’s what makes the structure at Jackson and Bennet so intriguing. It clearly appears on the 1874 map right where it sits today, but it isn’t labeled as a schoolhouse. That means that if the building was a school, it must have been an early one. Enter Greg. In a comment, he wrote that the “Delaware County Historic Sites Survey does indeed list this address as a former school, with an original time period of the 1850s and a hand-drawn map showing the section of the structure that was the schoolhouse.”

I followed the link Greg sent, and here’s what the state historical database says about the house on East Jackson, verbatim: “Brick 1/2 story L plan gable roof composition was a 2 story school house originally fire plan T addition to add K and DR owner says full basement plus floors of brick original portion brick laid common bond on stone foundation veranda porch w/5 sq wooden pillars porch has shed roof windows plain surround with stone sills on original portion¹.” 

I take that to mean that a kitchen and dining room were added to the original schoolhouse, which appears to have been the westernmost portion of the current structure that I took photos of five years ago or so. I bet the add-ons occurred in 1913, and Greg agrees. That’s the year the county assessor says the structure was built.

Like Greg said, SHAARD’s Delaware County Historic Sites Survey lists the building’s period of significance as 1850². It also shows a schematic of the original portion of the school, along with several photos of the property from the 1980s. 1850 is awfully early for a brick schoolhouse, but if everything’s correct, it would probably have served as a subscription school, where students’ parents paid for their education for a portion of the year.

Unfortunately, that’s about where the trail goes cold. Even after tracing the land the building sits on all the way back to 1851, I still haven’t found out much else!  In 1874, the structure -already shuttered as a schoolhouse based on plat maps- sat on 160 acres owned by A.B. Claypool³. He’d acquired the property in 1867 from Williams Petty⁴, who had taken ownership seven years earlier from Jonathan Petty⁵. Jonathan received the land from Volney Willson in 1857⁶; Willson had purchased it from Peter Mock in 1851⁷.

Unfortunately, none of the standard county histories by Helm, Kemper, or Haimbaugh really mention the early Center Township schools outside Muncie’s limits. Newspaper searches come up empty, too. There’s no Claypool schoolhouse. No Petty schoolhouse. No Wilson or Mock, either. SHAARD suggests the building’s too old to have been the Boyceton schoolhouse, as well. As far down the rabbit hole I’ve fallen, the old building at Bennett and Jackson holds a story that still won’t quite tell itself. At least we know it appears to have actually been a school!

Sources Cited
1 Survey Number 035-441-45225 (1985). IHSSI (County Survey). SHAARD. Indiana Department of Natural Resources [Indianapolis]. Web. Retrieved April 20, 2026. 
2 (See footnote 1). 
3 Map of Delaware County, Indiana (1874). A.L. Kingman [Philadelphia]. Map. 
4 Delaware County, Indiana. (1867, May 20). Deed Book 30. p. 256.
5 Delaware County, Indiana. (1860, May 12). Deed Book 22. p. 354.
6 Delaware County, Indiana. (1857, January 10). Deed Book 18. p. 490.
7 Delaware County, Indiana (1851, December 29). Deed Book 12. p. 375.