Read time: 5 min.

Five years ago, I launched a mission to track down every old schoolhouse in Madison County, Indiana. By the time I finished, I’d located forty-five of them. Some were standing, some were hanging on, and others were crumbling into ruins. Unfortunately, my total of forty-five has dropped by one: I recently discovered that the house I believed was Fall Creek Township’s old Spring Valley School wasn’t the school at all. It was close, though! Let me explain:

Spring Valley was an informal community around the corner of IN-38 (the old Pendleton and New Castle Pike) and South County Road 150-West. Home to many Quakers including several involved with the Underground Railroad¹, the neighborhood grew enough to need its own schoolhouse. In 1880, Fall Creek Township’s District 3 school stood at the southeast corner of the intersection². A brick replacement was built in 1902³. 

The Spring Valley school closed in 1925, but that wasn’t the end of its story: three years later, the place reopened with thirty-two students as one of only three surviving rural schools in Fall Creek Township⁴. Unfortunately, the reprieve didn’t last long: in 1933, the abandoned building and four surrounding acres were sold to Hobart Noland⁵, who planned to convert the building into a home⁶. For years, that’s where my research trail stopped. It’s why I became convinced the house standing there today had once been the school itself.

My approach to tracking down Madison County’s old schoolhouses was only partially a research project. It was also a call for help! I found many on old plat maps and matched them against modern aerials, but I blindly emailed the Madison County Historian with questions. To my surprise, my message turned into a fantastic back-and-forth. When Spring Valley came up, my takeaway was that the old school had been heavily remodeled into its current form⁷. That tracked with what I found, so I stopped researching. It didn’t look much like a schoolhouse, but I figured that a legitimate historian knew more than me. I happily categorized it as a schoolhouse still standing. 

I was in Pendleton the other day and I searched SHAARD for local sites of interest I hadn’t written about yet. SHAARD- the State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database- is Indiana’s online archive for historic buildings, archaeological sites, cemeteries, bridges, and preservation records. It’s full of great information! Near the top of my query was a building simply listed as home. I recognized it and was heartbroken by the caption. “Formerly Spring Valley Schoolhouse,” it read, “which was demolished and materials were used to build this house⁸.” 

Ope. Turns out that I hadn’t quite finished the story after all. It didn’t take long before I uncovered a newspaper article that revealed Clifford Stricker tore down the old Spring Valley School after he bought it from Hobart Nolan. Stricker built an entirely new home on the site⁹, and SHAARD backs it up. The home at the corner of State Road 38 and West County Road 150 was never the school itself, but was built from its materials.

That revelation answers a lot of questions I’d wondered about over the years. The proportions never quite looked right. The masonry was too clean. The orientation seemed odd for a rural school, and so on. I’d chalked those inconsistencies up to decades of remodeling, but the truth was that the schoolhouse had vanished. That discovery forces me to reexamine several other “schoolhouses” I’ve documented across Madison County. 

A few of the old schoolhouses people have pointed out to me don’t really look like schoolhouses at all. I’m used to seeing heavy remodels, but it makes me wonder how many are truly former schools and how many are something else entirely: houses built from salvaged materials, structures altered beyond recognition, or stories repeated so often that they gradually hardened into “fact.” That’s part of both the danger and the excitement of local history! Sometimes, the closer you look, the blurrier things become. Even so, I’d rather uncover an inconvenient truth than keep repeating a comfortable mistake. Besides, there are still plenty of genuine schoolhouses out there waiting to be found.

Sources Cited
1 Jackson, S. T. (2018, April 1). Incident involving Douglass highlights history of Spring Valley. The Anderson Herald Bulletin. Web. Retrieved December 25, 2021. 
2 Kingman Brothers. (1880). History of Madison County, Indiana with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches. Chicago, IL.
3 Jackson, S. T. (2021, February 8). Local folks risked their freedom to help runaway slaves. The Anderson Herald Bulletin. Web. Retrieved December 25, 2021.
4 Spring Valley School Opened (1928, November 2). The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 23. 
5 Local Items (1933, September 14). The Pendleton Times-Post. p. 1. 
6 Markleville Church Circle Has Meeting (1933, September 15). 
7 Jackson, S. T. (2021, August 19). Madison County schoolhouses. email.
8 Survey Number 095-502-60013 (1981). IHSSI (County Survey). SHAARD. Indiana Department of Natural Resources [Indianapolis]. Web. Retrieved May 10, 2026. 
9 Spring Valley (1937, May 20). The Pendleton Times-Post. p. 3.