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LaGrangeCounty Gazette

Schools

LaGrange

The building went to the carriage works

The county seat ran out of money before the roof was on. The shell was finished by a church, failed, sold to a man, traded to a railroad, and hauled down the Haw Patch road to be a carriage factory. Eight years later the town built a school for thirty thousand dollars.

A detail from an 1887 fire insurance plan, printed in black line with the building washed in pink. A square block is lettered PUBLIC SCHOOL, with a construction note reading 2 and F. CH RF along one wall. A narrower wing runs west from it, lettered 1 and F. RF. Two small square projections stand off the building, each lettered TOWER, one numbered 4 on the east face of the block and one numbered 3 on the south face of the wing. HEAT COAL FURNACE is lettered on the open ground beside the block. The street along the bottom edge is lettered CENTRAL AVE. A north arrow stands at the left of the frame, pointing up.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Lagrange, LaGrange County, Indiana, November 1887, sheet 3. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. The sheet draws this block with north to the left; the detail has been turned a quarter turn clockwise so north is up, and is otherwise as printed.

  • A detail from an 1893 county atlas plate, printed in black line on a pink wash. A solid black five pointed star stands at the inner corner of a numbered section, with the words HOFF S.H. lettered beside it in small capitals.

    Bloomfield Township

    The old schoolhouse is the back room

    A schoolhouse was drawn on a LaGrange County map in 1874 and left unnamed. In 1904 the township built two rooms and a hall in front of it and kept the old building as the back room, where it still stands.

  • A printed page of an 1882 county history, a single column of set type on toned cream paper, numbered 73 at the top right beside the running head HISTORY OF LA GRANGE COUNTY. Three paragraphs of body type, the last of them running to the foot of the page and carrying a long series of personal names with dates against them. No illustration.

    Ontario

    The village with the college in it

    In the 1840s a district hired whoever would take the job, and paid them in corn. The fix was to gather teachers up and teach them how to teach. This county has been saying for a hundred and forty years that it went first, and nobody has ever been able to say who did it.

  • Eden Township

    A hole in the roof and the rest was the hearth

    The first schools in this county were log rooms with slabs for desks and no chimney. The teachers were paid ten dollars a month, or two bushels of corn a week, or ten shillings, and they lived in the houses of the families whose children they taught.

  • Ontario

    Human rights under whatever color

    In 1837 a board of trustees wrote down what their new school stood for, and the last item was human rights under whatever color or circumstances. Thirty-five years later the school asked how far it had kept that promise, and answered by talking about liquor.

The public schools

Each corporation publishes its own schools, calendars, board minutes and contacts. Those pages are current in a way a copied list never is.

The Indiana Department of Education publishes a directory of every school in the state, including these. Indiana Department of Education

Three public school corporations serve this county, and a substantial share of its children are educated outside them. This page links to the corporations rather than duplicating what they publish, carries what is not listed and why, and holds the history of how this county has schooled its children.

The schools that are not listed

Not all of this county's children go to those schools.

Many attend one-room parochial schools run by their own church districts. Those schools are small, they are organized by the families who use them rather than by a corporation or a diocese, and they are not accredited by the state, which means the state's directory does not list them.

They are not listed here either. That is a decision rather than an oversight. These are schools run by a handful of families for their own children, and the Gazette does not think a published list of their addresses is its business.

If you teach at one, or your children attend one, and there is something you would like recorded here, the door is open. Tell us

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