Tag Alexandria Indiana

Monroe Township’s Starr schoolhouse in Madison County

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 2 min.

A school at Starr’s Corner was first established in 1863. That year, John Sullivan taught classes in a log cabin. Later, the structure was designated to serve District 7 from the northwest corner of an E. Deadman’s farm a mile north of Alexandria1. The log cabin was eventually dismantled in order to erect a frame building, but the final schoolhouse was brick2. 

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Two more flowing wells in rural Madison County

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 8 min.

I wrote about a pair of artesian wells in Madison County a few Saturdays ago and headed to Mounds State Park to take photos and video of two more I knew of the day after. I found another the following Monday and another on Tuesday. When it rains, it pours! I love artesian wells, but my hobby of finding them was dormant until the past couple of weeks. Today, I’ll show you the two I uncovered -one literally- in northern Madison County, along with where I think a third one used to sit.

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What’s left of Monroe Township’s Tennessee schoolhouse in Madison County

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 3 min.

Monroe Township’s District 3 schoolhouse, commonly known as Tennessee, was visible on an 1880 plat map. It stood at the southwestern corner of the Lamar family’s seventy-eight acres a mile west of Gilman, or two miles south and four miles east of Alexandria1.  Gilman was a tiny hamlet with no schoolhouse of its own after 1906, so the Tennessee school served the kids who lived there.

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Monroe Township’s Vermillion schoolhouse in Madison County

Ted Shideler Leave a comment
Read time: 2 min.

A schoolhouse sat on the land of Uriah Columbus Vermillion as early as 18801. Vermillion was a prominent farmer who lent his last name to a creek, two churches, and Monroe Township’s District 15 schoolhouse. All that made up a loose community located near his land along the Jackson Street Pike in eastern Madison County.

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Twelve more miles of the old Hub Highway from Bethel to Orestes

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 9 min.

Early automobile clubs in Indiana began to promote national auto trails that predated official state highways around the turn of the twentieth century. By 1922, the Hoosier State Automobile Association had laid out thirty-four of them1! One was the Hub Highway, which connected Lafayette and Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1917. In Delaware and Madison Counties, the road followed Bethel Pike from Muncie to Alexandria. There, it took Washington Street towards Orestes.

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