A hole in the roof and the rest was the hearth

The first school in the county was taught by John B. Howe in 1833, in a log house a quarter of a mile southeast of Lima.

Three or four small windows. A huge fireplace. A few rough desks and benches. Eighteen or twenty children, and ten or twelve dollars a month for the man teaching them.

Howe was clear afterward about where the money came from. It was raised by ordinary taxation or from the sale of Section 16, the land Congress set aside in every township for schools. It was not a subscription school.

Frederick Hamilton took the second term in the same house. After about 1835 nobody taught there again, and school moved into whatever building was empty.

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The one at Denny's Corners in Eden Township was worse and the county history describes it exactly.

It was a primitive affair. One end of the building was the fireplace. There was nothing in the way of chimney but a hole in the roof, and the rest of the building, it seems, was the hearth.

Pins were driven into the logs of the wall and slabs laid across them, and those were the desks. The seats were slabs too, without backs.

Robinson Ramsby taught in it in 1836. A man the book calls Old Mr. Lucky taught in it about a year later. Achsah Kent, who by 1882 was Mrs. Nathan Frink, was one of the earliest teachers there.

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The one at Ontario, built in 1835, was built the same way and the book takes more care with how. The village would have a collegiate institute before the decade was out.

The seats were slabs with long wooden pins driven into auger holes for legs. The desks were made by driving strong pieces of wood horizontally into mortises in the wall, propping the far end on a leg, and laying a slab across two of them.

A huge fireplace at one end, and the smoke and flame went up a broad chimney built of sticks and plastered with clay mortar.

An English lady from White Pigeon taught twelve or fourteen children in it. The building burned down shortly before her three-month term was out.

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Where there was no schoolhouse, they used what there was.

In 1838 a man named Barns, living a short way north of Wolcottville, built a log barn, and his daughter taught school in it that summer. Six families sent their children. No other term was ever taught there, because at the end of that one the barn went back to the animals.

School was held in Mr. Cory's house, in the Presbyterian church, in private dwellings, and in the courthouse. After the county seat moved to LaGrange the old courthouse at Lima was used as a schoolhouse, and also as a hotel. The county seat's own schools began the same way, in a barn.

In Eden the first school of all was in a log cabin half a mile west of Denny's Corners, in the winter of 1834, and it produced the only recorded disturbance in any of this.

The big boys in those days were as unruly as in modern times, the county history says, and a disturbance at one time arose in this school which compelled the attendance of a number of them at the court in Lima for several days.

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The teachers were paid in whatever the district had.

Levi Wildman, teaching half a mile south of Wolcottville in 1838, got ten dollars a month and boarding round, which meant living a week at a time in the houses of the families who sent children.

Lucretia Crandall was paid ten shillings a week for a summer term in 1841, and twelve shillings a week for the winter before that.

Elmira Crandall taught the winter of 1842 and 1843 at Valentine. She boarded at Hiram Gardner's and paid him two bushels of corn a week for it.

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Most of the buildings did not last.

The one at Ontario burned before its first term ended. The one north of Wolcottville burned and was rebuilt. The one north of the Tamarack was abandoned after five or six years, replaced with a frame that burned two years later, replaced again, and that one stood until 1881.

The log dwelling on the Schoonover farm was used as a school until it burned about twenty-five years before the book was written.

Then the brick came. The Haw Patch Schoolhouse in Eden in 1877. The two-story brick at Wright's Corners in 1878, at over two thousand dollars. The brick north of the Tamarack in 1881.

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By 1882 Eden Township had two hundred and eighty-eight children of school age.

A hundred and ninety of them were in a schoolroom on an average day. The school year ran a hundred and forty-two days.

Nine teachers taught them, at a dollar fifty-five a day and a dollar thirty-nine a day.

The book gives the two figures without explaining them. Elsewhere in the same volume, in the county's education chapter, the pattern is set out plainly: male teachers in the townships were paid a dollar sixty a day and female teachers a dollar twenty-nine.

The township spent four thousand eight hundred and twenty-three dollars and sixty-seven cents that year, and its school property was valued at five thousand eight hundred and ninety.

Forty-eight years after a man taught eighteen children in a log room with three small windows in it.