From 1997 to 2011, nearly every trip to my dad’s carried me past the tiny town of Kimmell on US-33, a stretch of the old Lincoln Highway. The road’s modern routing glides over the town on an overpass. Because of that, I somehow missed one of the community’s best landmarks: an old schoolhouse situated at the corner of Schlabach Street and Jackson. Once I finally spotted it, I knew I had to turn around and take a closer look.

One of my oldest schoolhouse mysteries involved the District 7 building in Henry County’s Dudley Township. An old Quaker meetinghouse called Hopewell stands nearby. I attended a meeting there something like twenty years ago and was told the building had originally served as a schoolhouse! Its T-shaped form looked the part, and I carried that little nugget around for years. Unfortunately, the truth appears to be sitting right next door, where some very obvious evidence comes to a different conclusion.

Throughout its history, Grant County’s Green Township was home to as many as six one-room district schoolhouses¹. That changed in 1924, when the Green School Township issued $60,000 in bonds to build a consolidated structure just north of Point Isabel². All of the rural schools closed when the building was dedicated on August 3, 1925³. 

I was driving through White County near the northwestern portion of Indiana when I stumbled across this old frame building near of Burnettsville. Based on its appearance, I assumed it may have been an old school so I grabbed a couple of photos just in case. As it turns out, this was Jackson Township’s old Shull Schoolhouse!

I had a lot of fun proposing a 160-foot Garfield statue for downtown Muncie. Unfortunately, many of the people I shared it with on Facebook didn’t enjoy my concept so much. People on Facebook don’t have a sense of humor? That’s news to me! Still, Delaware County’s impeccable fiscal condition, immaculate infrastructure, and famous lack of corruption lead me to continue past Garfield. Surely the boomtowns of Yorktown, Selma, Gaston, Daleville, Eaton, and Albany deserve monumental landmarks of their own.