Researching Huntington County’s old Ginger Hill schoolhouse -District 8 in Jackson Township- introduced something I’d never seen before: an 1879 plat map that shows it as “Contemplated S.H. No. 8¹!” Indeed, that’s the year it was built on land owned by William Brown². 

I’ve spent fifteen years trying to find a photograph of Mt. Pleasant Township’s long-lost Sycamore School in Delaware County. That’s nearly forty percent of my life! Somewhere along the way, the building became my white whale; the one local landmark I was convinced had vanished without leaving so much as a single image behind. Then yesterday, while researching something completely unrelated, I stumbled across one by accident. The school looked nothing like I’d imagined.

A schoolhouse serving District 3 has stood at the corner of Old Fort Wayne Road and East Lamont Road in Huntington’s Union Township since at least 1866, when it appeared just north of the Wabash & Erie Canal on land owned by the Silvers family¹. The building was commonly known as Whippoorwill². 

I was flipping through some new-to-me files the other day when I stumbled across History of the Mt. Pleasant Township School System by Anna Williams. I figured I had a pretty solid grasp on that subject, especially after untangling the whole Cammack brouhaha. Still, one detail jumped off the page as I read: had I somehow overlooked a schoolhouse all this time? I couldn’t have!

My mom and I were crawling through traffic on the old Lincoln Highway between Fort Wayne and Churubusco when she pointed out what looked like an old schoolhouse. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed it before- that stretch of highway was practically stitched into my childhood! Maybe I had seen it once upon a time, back before one-room schools hijacked my brain. Either way, the building finally caught my attention, and once it did, I had to know its story.

Not long ago, I wrote about a drive through Delaware County with Grandma, Mom, and Aunt Jan that recreated the 2002 trip that turned me into a full-blown schoolhouse freak. Just like Mom did twenty-four years earlier, I documented the schools we passed with her Sony Mavica FD-75, a gloriously obsolete digital camera that stored its photos on floppy disks. Naturally, I also snapped backup shots with my iPhone. Here they are.

Most people drive past the McDonald’s at Charles and Madison in Muncie without giving it a second thought. After all, it’s just another fast-food restaurant. Look just to the left, though, and you’ll find one of Indiana’s most remarkable surviving roadside landmarks: a giant neon sign from 1958 featuring a grinning mascot with a hamburger-shaped head! Long before Ronald McDonald and supersized meals, this downtown corner marked the arrival of a fast-food revolution in Muncie.

I’m normally pretty good at researching old common schoolhouses, but those operated by religious organizations tend to stymie me. Their histories rarely show up in the records I rely on, and the paper trail often fades fast. That was the case with the old New Garden Academy a mile south of Fountain City! I spun my wheels for a while before an unexpected breakthrough in the form of an obscure book tucked away in my mom’s office.

As an unincorporated village in rural Tipton County away from nearly every highway, Curtisville is the kind of place you don’t venture to unless you’re really looking for stuff. As it happened, I was! A stray social media post mentioned an old gym in town, which was enough to send me digging. It took some effort to track down, but once I did, parts of a story started to come into focus.