They wrote to Vermont for a teacher

Johnson is the lake township. Nothing else in the county comes close, with fifteen lakes wholly or partly inside its lines. Oliver is the largest at about six hundred acres. Adams is second, and Witmer and Atwood are not much behind it.

The first white presence there was not a farm. It was a bar.

Sometime around 1833, and possibly a year earlier, a Fort Wayne trading house sent one or more Frenchmen up to a place called the Tamarack to open a station and trade with the Potawatomi. They put up a cabin first and then a double log building meant as a hotel, stocked with goods and with whisky. It was built of tamarack poles six or eight inches thick, and everyone for a long way around knew it as the Tamarack House.

One of the traders was a man named Runeaux, a brother-in-law of the Fort Wayne merchant. He died early, and his widow ran the tavern for the firm.

Later the place passed to a man named Burris, and his wife tended the bar when he was out. The county history published in 1882 records what happened one day while she was doing it. Several men came in and drank, and one of them got half drunk. He watched her leave the room on an errand and stationed himself behind the door, and when she came back he struck at her with a knife.

She dodged it, went over the counter, and came up with a loaded rifle. He was out the door before she got it to her shoulder. She followed him to the doorway and fired and missed, and he was gone into the woods. She ordered the rest of them out.

The Tamarack got worse before it got better. Stolen horses were brought there and hidden in the surrounding marshes, and men passing bad coin and counterfeit bills found it a safe place to be when someone was after them. Neighbors helped hide the property and the men.

The county history sums it up in five words. Tamarack was truly a bad place.

---

Levi Wright had the best chance of anyone to build a town, and he refused it.

He came in the fall of 1834, entered eighty acres the following February, and bought more than three hundred more within two years. The crossroads near his land is still called Wright's Corners. A store opened there around 1847 and did well enough to buy country produce and livestock and ship it out.

Tradesmen came to Wright and asked to buy lots so they could put up shops. He would not sell. The county history says he obstinately refused and thereby prevented the growth of quite a village, and adds that had he encouraged it, as he alone could have, the railroad might be running through the place today.

It never got past eight or ten families.

He was not idle otherwise. In 1836 he brought about fifty apple trees and a number of currant bushes up from a nursery on one of the prairies, and as far as anyone knew they were the first of their kind planted in the township.

---

George Wolcott arrived in September of 1837 with money and no intention of refusing anybody anything.

He built a saw mill immediately and finished it in 1838. He added millstones, then moved the sawing operation up the race and turned the old room into a wool carding shop. He built a store in 1839 and stocked it with a thousand dollars of goods, and within a decade was carrying seven thousand. He put up the grist mill in 1845 and a bigger store in 1847.

The county history says that at one point he was running seven occupations at once: milling, sawing, blacksmithing, storekeeping, coopering, farming, and making potash. He had perhaps twenty men working for him and had built about fifteen buildings in the village, which he rented or sold as people needed them.

There was a small distillery. The county history is unsure whether it was his or a partner's and notes, without further comment, that what was made there was consumed about as fast as it was made.

While he ran the old grist mill, he fed the men who came to him for flour at no charge.

In 1840 the village had twenty people in it. By 1850 it had a hundred.

---

In 1851 he decided the schools were not good enough.

At the time, the Protestant denominations in the East had noticed that Catholic teachers were going out into the western backwoods and Protestant ones were not, and they had set up a National Board of Education to do something about it. Its president was a former governor of Vermont named Slade.

Wolcott wrote to him and asked him to send out a thoroughly competent Christian teacher. He wanted a governess for his own family to start with, until something could be arranged in a public school.

Slade sent Susan Griggs.

She reached Wolcottville in October of 1851 at a salary of two hundred fifty dollars a year, and began with a single pupil. Word got around and other families asked whether she would take their children. Wolcott fitted up one of his houses for her, and she taught twelve that winter and thirty the following summer.

Over the summer of 1852 he spent more than three thousand dollars putting up a seminary building and a second frame building where students could take rooms.

School opened there in November. Tuition was three dollars and fifty cents for an eleven week term, with extra for Latin, French, German, oil painting, or music. About fifty students came that first winter. Miss Eliza Dudley came out from New York to assist.

The arrangement was that Griggs kept whatever the tuition brought in, and was responsible for keeping the buildings in repair.

---

She ran it for seventeen years.

Enrollment reached a hundred fifteen at its highest and averaged about sixty-five across the whole run. Sometimes she needed two assistants. Roughly two thirds of the students came from outside the county. The school was designed for young women and was opened to young men as well. It was not denominational, though there were Christian exercises. It never granted a diploma.

She started a Sunday school in the building in 1852 and superintended it herself for thirteen consecutive years.

In 1858 the Methodist society in Wolcottville had fallen to seven members, all of them women. She was one of the seven.

The county history says the effect on the neighborhood was quickly visible, that education and intelligence were at a premium, and that Wolcottville got a reputation across a wide stretch of country for its brightness and general excellence.

In 1869 her health gave out and she had to leave the school. The county history says she gave herself no relaxation from labor and that this was the necessary consequence.

---

Weston Goodspeed, writing the Johnson Township chapter in 1882, did something historians do not usually do.

He wrote that in view of her long years at the village, and how many people had been made happier by her, and how many hundreds had gone out from her instruction with truer ideas of life and its duties, it was unquestionably due her from the citizens that her declining years be rendered free from the bitterness of poverty and thanklessness.

That is a county history asking a town, in print, not to let a woman die poor.

The seminary was absorbed into the public schools of Wolcottville not long after she left it.

The next county history came through in 1920, and it remembered her. She is in the index. The chapter on schools names her and gives Wolcott the request and the building. The chapter on churches still lists her first among the seven women who held the Methodist society together in 1858, thirty-eight years on.

And in the book's chronology, under the year 1851, the entry reads that the Wolcottville Seminary was founded by Miss Susan Griggs.

Battey gave the founding to the man who paid for it. Ford gave it to the woman who ran it.

What Ford does not carry is Goodspeed's sentence. In 1920 the school was in charge of Miss Griggs until 1869, when her health failed. Same fact, and nothing asked of anybody.

Neither book says what became of her.