Read time: 8 min.

Every obsession starts somewhere, even if you don’t recognize it at the time. My decades-long mania for one-room schoolhouses began in the summer of 2002, when my mom and grandma drove around Delaware County hunting for all of them they could find. I tagged along, not realizing that the drive would stay with me forever. Recently, I recreated the schoolhouse search with the same people and the same camera. 

I was twelve by the time Grandma first took me to the Delaware County Historical Society to volunteer. I’d rather have stayed home with Grandpa shooting hoops, but she’d recently completed a curriculum book for fourth-graders studying Indiana history called “Gas Wells, Peat Bogs, and Hotel Rooms.” It included a series of township maps with the locations of historic hotels, rare round barns, and scads of schoolhouses. Once it came up, a drive around the county to find some of them with Grandma and Mom sounded fun! 

After we set out, we passed school after school. They were everywhere! Mom took photos of each of them, probably twenty or so. I was amazed that so many still existed. Now, twenty-four years later, I’ve been to hundreds of one-room schoolhouses. I’ve poured hours into researching them, written blog posts, and given presentations. When the idea struck to recreate the trip that first sent me down this path, I was raring to go.

The key to doing so was the Sony Mavica FD-75, which my mom still somehow retained. Released in 2001, it shoots 0.3 megapixel JPEGs at 640×480 resolution saved to an onboard floppy disk. Yes, a floppy disk! The camera is absurdly outdated and features an ancient battery, but it documented the beginning of my schoolhouse obsession. The photos Mom took twenty-three years ago have been lost to time, but I wanted to pull the camera out of retirement for one last go to capture the spirit of that long-ago trip. 

Unfortunately, I was a little wary about trusting a proprietary twenty-five-year-old battery to survive an entire day of wandering the backroads. My confidence wasn’t exactly boosted when the thing lost nearly twenty percent of its charge in the two minutes it took me to delete four old photos from its floppy disk! We brought along a power inverter so I could recharge the battery in the car, but there turned out to be a catch: the Mavica couldn’t actually run off of wall power. If the battery died, the camera died with it. It was battery or bust. 

Despite the likelihood of empty battery or a corrupted floppy, Mom and I picked Grandma and Aunt Jan up. We set our sights for Wheeling, a tiny community north of Muncie on old US-35. Twenty-four years ago, I was just the kid tagging along. On our return trip, though, I was the guide explaining the buildings’ histories. 

Grandma retained details, Mom remembered roads, and Aunt Jan soaked everything in by asking questions. Our journey became a multigenerational memory-sharing session! More than any stop, that new definition felt most apparent when we arrived at what was left of the old Nixon schoolhouse in Union Township. The building was already a tumble-down ruin arond 2002, but it was nearly invisible this time around! Only brief flashes of its brick walls poked through the foliage as we slowly drove past. 

We parked in the side yard of Union Township’s old Center schoolhouse for a while and soaked in the details of it. Twenty-four years ago, the old school was painted a dingy yellow; now it’s sort of a purplish brown. Aunt Jan pointed out its window infills, Mom mentioned their intricate heads, and I surmised that it had been cut into two stories. Last I knew, the old school was a home. Grandma thought the same, despite its apparent emptiness. In 2002, places like Center were new discoveries. Years later, they were anchors. 

We were about half an hour into our trip by the time we reached Center, then Oak Grove. Unbelievably, the old Mavica still had juice! That said, it featured a slow shutter and a narrower field of view than my phone and saving a picture to the floppy was painfully slow. As luck would have it, though, that slowness fit the trip perfectly: we weren’t rushing from school to school; we were lingering, chatting, and remembering. 

The Mavica’s images are objectively awful by modern standards, even not including that dreadful dust spot on the lens. At maximum quality, it shoots grainy 640×480 JPEGs that look like they were recovered from a VHS tape. Still, when I reviewed the photos later, I realized the old camera had done something perfect: the images looked the way my memories felt. Perhaps no clearer was that impact than in Albany, where we revisited the old East Albany schoolhouse- the only one Mom, Grandma, and I ventured into during our long-ago trip. 

As we ate lunch and left Albany towards the old Valley College school near DeSoto, I realized our recent trip wasn’t just about revisiting a fun memory. Instead, we’d returned to the moment my worldview changed. At twelve, I learned that history exists outside of some boring museum. It took years to fully understand it, but somewhere along those county roads, the genesis of what eventually became this blog started to take shape. 

Mom, Grandma, Aunt Jan, and I wound up looping around Delaware County that day, retracing roads that had shaped the course of my research without any of us realizing it two decades ago. Near the end, we visited the old Smithfield schoolhouse. Eventually, we revisited twelve old schoolhouses! Back in 2002, those buildings stopped being anonymous little structures along the roadside and started becoming pieces of hidden history. More than two decades later, they still haven’t let go of me.

Once I got home, there was still one ritual left: I popped the floppy disk out of the Mavica and slid it into an external floppy drive plugged into a dongle hanging off the side of my MacBook. The drive whirred, clicked, paused, then whirred some more while I waited impatiently for the ancient disk to load. Everything about the process felt absurd as twenty-five-year-old technology strained to communicate with a modern laptop through layers of compromise. Somehow, though, it worked.

One by one, the photos finally appeared on my screen. They were terribly low-fidelity. I couldn’t believe photos like those passed muster when the camera was new! Still, the longer I stared at them, the more perfect they felt. Again, the thought occurred to me that the Mavica hadn’t captured those schoolhouses the way they actually looked. It captured them the way they existed in my memory.

Sitting there watching blurry little schoolhouses slowly materialize in Finder from a floppy disk, I realized our family trip had only changed in certain intrinsic ways. Twenty-four years ago, Mom, Grandma, and I wandered Delaware County looking for forgotten pieces of history hidden along the roadside. We did exactly the same thing this time around, but the roads were familiar. The schools were older, but so were we. None were forgotten! Still, every time another little brick building appeared around a bend, I felt the same sense of discovery I did back when I was twelve.

That’s the funny thing about hidden places like old schoolhouses: once you learn how to see them, they never completely disappear. I’ll share some iPhone photos of the same places soon.