Williamsburg, Indiana, is an unincorporated community platted in 1830. Situated around US-35 and the old Centerville Road, it’s about twelve miles northwest of the heart of downtown Richmond. I’ve passed the old Green Township school there countless times, but never got a chance to explore it until just recently. What a treasure! I’m glad I did. 

Almost exactly a year ago, I was wandering through Huntington County when I stumbled past the old Belleville schoolhouse north of Warren. As I researched, I read a Facebook post I can no longer find that asserted it was Huntington County’s last old schoolhouse! I took that as a personal challenge to find more, and wound up with eight. Here they are. 

Delaware County’s Cammack schoolhouse carries a lingering mystery that traces back to an 1887 plat map. Regardless of who you ask, it seems, conventional wisdom insists that the schoolhouse originally stood at the end of Jackson Street, just west of Yorktown-Gaston Pike. I never bought it myself, but that interpretation hardened into “fact” simply because people kept repeating what they thought the map showed. Today, I’d like to yammer on with proof that the old schoolhouse never stood there. I apologize in advance for my stridency. 

Sorry, again, for this, but two days ago, the Muncie Historic Preservation and Rehabilitation Commission posted on Facebook that the old Forest Park Elementary is “the city’s oldest existing public school building.” It isn’t, and my comments and blog post got the commission to issue a correction “As stated by Mr. Ted Shideler, there are examples of older historic school houses and buildings in Muncie. Research confirms that the Forest Park Elementary School is the city’s oldest existing public school building that is currently listed in the National Register of Historic Places.” Unfortunately, that’s wrong too. The commission fumbled again.

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Continue reading “Sorry for two schoolhouse posts in a row, but I’m noticing an alarming pattern” →

Back in 2022, I found what I thought might be Hamilton County’s old Bakers Corner schoolhouse. I was never fully convinced, though, and even wrote a post about my lingering doubts. The problem was that the post wasn’t very good and the photo I grabbed of the building was downright awful, so I kept kicking it down the road. Then, yesterday morning, I finally uncovered proof that the building really was the schoolhouse! As luck would have it, I happened to drive past it later that same day.

I used to think my quest to visit every Indiana courthouse and every nearby schoolhouse was sort of unhinged, but then there’s my friend Brett: he’s on a mission to see every high school gym, past and present! Brett’s as sharp as they come, but now and then he runs into a head-scratcher and calls me in to try and help. The latest mystery was Warrick County’s Tennyson Elementary.

Yesterday’s post about the hopeful restoration of the old Corinth schoolhouse sent me down a tangent I’d like to explore a little further. Various sources describe Corinth as Delaware County’s last brick schoolhouse¹; the county’s only surviving school from before 1878, bizarrely²; or “one of the few remaining structures of its kind³.” I’m sure those claims were made in good faith, but they simply aren’t true. More importantly, they overshadow the myriad surviving schoolhouses scattered across Delaware County. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of those forgotten survivors. Even if they can’t be realistically restored like Corinth, they at least deserve some attention.

Indiana’s dotted with hundreds of old one-room schools, and Delaware County is no exception. Of all of them, though, the best-preserved is undoubtedly Monroe Township’s old District 3 school, better known as Corinth. A newly-formed group aims to restore the historic building and return the old schoolhouse to its former glory.

The tiny Grant County community of Fowlerton isn’t on the way to anywhere, but 268 people still call it home. An old schoolhouse anchors the north end of town, but much of Leach Avenue -Fowlerton’s main drag- has long shed its commercial storefronts. All except one, that is: a lone survivor anchors the southeast corner of Leach and West Second Street. On a recent drive through town, I found myself slowing down and wondering about it.