Human rights under whatever color

The first school in this county was taught by John B. Howe in 1833, in a log house about 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. Howe was paid ten or twelve dollars a month, and he was clear later 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.

Two years later somebody built one at Ontario, four miles north.

The seats were slabs with wooden pins driven into auger holes for legs. The desks were made by driving strong pieces of wood into mortises in the wall, propping the far end on a leg, and laying a slab across. There was a fireplace at one end and a chimney of sticks 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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That same year, in Victor, New York, a group of men decided to found a college in the West.

Nathan Jenks was one of them. He had been a member of an infidel club before he heard Charles Finney preach, and after his conversion he settled on a plan: an institution somewhere in the western country, modeled on Oberlin.

That model mattered. Oberlin had opened in Ohio four years earlier under the name Oberlin Collegiate Institute. It took women from the start, though in a separate Ladies Course rather than the degree program, and from 1835 it admitted Black students, after a trustee named John Keep cast the deciding vote. It was the most radical school in America and everyone knew it.

The men at Ontario were not admiring it from a distance.

Jenks and several others came out to Ontario in 1836, bought land, and settled. The village already had a log schoolhouse with slab seats, a year old.

On the sixth of February, 1837, they met at Lewis Vance's house in Lima and resolved that they were warranted in undertaking to establish a literary institution, to be called the LaGrange Collegiate Institute.

Then they named seven trustees. The county history published in 1882 lists them plainly. The Institute's own minutes list them with their addresses, and the second name reads Rev. John J. Shipherd, of Oberlin, Ohio.

John Jay Shipherd had founded Oberlin. He was in Indiana in person that autumn, attending board meetings on the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh of September and again on the fourth of October, and at the last of them the board asked him to become its general agent and raise its money.

The minutes record his answer. He declined on the ground that, at present, the prospect before him would not warrant the undertaking.

Six years later he started a college at Olivet in Michigan and died there soon after.

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They adopted a prospectus the same day.

Five departments. A preparatory school. A collegiate course. A full theological course. A shorter and irregular course for people advanced in life or in peculiar circumstances. And a thorough course of female education.

The courses would be decidedly of a Christian character, to the exclusion of demoralizing pagan authors and sectarian principles. The manual labor system would run through all the scientific departments.

Then they wrote down why.

Corporate bodies and public institutions, no less than individuals, are bound to do right, irrespective of worldly expediencies, popular favor, or any consequences. Therefore this institution will allow free discussion, and openly sustain the great moral enterprises of the day, such as Revivals, Temperance in all things, the sanctification of the Sabbath, Moral Reform, Christian Union, and human rights under whatever color or circumstances.

On the page it is the last of six items in a list, set in ordinary type, carrying no more weight than the Sabbath.

Fourteen years later, the state of Indiana wrote into its new constitution that no Black person could come into the state and settle here.

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Two days after the meeting, the trustees chose a site.

They put it at Ontario, which is in Lima Township, except that the ground they picked was a short way south across the line in Bloomfield. The village and the school were in different townships and the county history files the whole account under Lima anyway.

Jenks put up five thousand dollars, conditional on the citizens raising ten thousand more.

In May they built a frame workshop, eighteen feet by twenty-six, to put up the real building from and to use afterward as a schoolroom and dormitory. Cyrill Wilson and his wife Beulah taught in it through the winter of 1837 and 1838, and she kept teaching until the fourth of July.

What stopped her was the sickly season. Wilson wrote about it thirty-four years later, and the county history prints what he said. Business stopped entirely before the tenth. From the twentieth there was one man, a Mr. Salmon, still able to go around to the fifteen or eighteen families, and he was only just able to carry a pitcher of water to each.

They raised the main frame that August, fifty feet by sixty, three stories. It was in use by 1839 and finished in 1840.

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Lima tried to take it.

The town offered thirty village lots, an eighty acre tract adjoining the village at half price for a site, a considerable sum of money, and grain standing on the ground. The trustees wrote their answer into the minutes.

This proposition not being considered equal to Nathan Jenks' pledge of ten thousand dollars, and in view of our having a flourishing school in operation, numbering from fifty to sixty students and a building erected worth about four thousand dollars, the proposition was rejected by a unanimous vote.

The Institute opened formally on the twenty-first of October, 1839, with one department running, the preparatory one.

Between twenty-five and a hundred twenty-five students came every year. Over its life, more than two thousand names went onto its catalogue. Rufus Patch ran it three separate times and gave it twenty-seven years altogether.

The county history says neighboring towns were green with jealousy.

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In 1872 the Institute published a history and catalogue of itself, sixty-three pages, printed at LaGrange.

Partway through, it stops and asks itself a question, set in capitals across two lines.

How far has the Institute realized the design of its founders?

The next word is Answer, and what follows is one paragraph running across two pages.

It begins by conceding. It has no collegiate department and no theological department and is not technically a manual labor school. Only one of the contemplated departments was ever organized. As an academy it has done its work and achieved its success, and incidentally, but very imperfectly, it has secured some of the other desired results.

Then it starts naming what it did keep.

It has certainly given female students as good opportunities as males.

That is a founding promise, kept, stated plainly and without hedging, in a document that has just spent two sentences admitting failures. The thorough course of female education was one of the five departments and it is the one that survived.

The paragraph goes on. The shorter and irregular course turned out to be the prevailing one. Several graduates of the Bible class were approved as ministers. One early student spent a quarter of a century as a missionary to China, and one assistant teacher worked several years in the same capacity at Ur of the Chaldees.

Then it reaches the last plank in the founders' list.

Our testimony in favor of "Human Rights" has never been wanting. In the village of Ontario intoxicating liquors have never been sold, but in defiance of both law and public sentiment.

That is the whole of the answer. The school that put human rights under whatever color into its charter, auditing itself seven years after the war, offers one piece of evidence, and the evidence is that liquor was not sold in the village except when it was.

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The paragraph has three moves left in it.

The teachers always acted in harmony with the religious community around them, though some belonged to communions not represented there. The founders were doubtless disappointed, and should have counted the cost of the proposed undertaking, with the word should set in italics.

And then the last line, which is not the Institute's own.

The investment has, however, proved a good one. They planted more wisely than they knew.

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The Institute stopped teaching in 1879 and its affairs were wound up in 1881.

John B. Howe, who taught the first school in this county in a log house four miles from where the Institute stood, went to Indianapolis in 1850 as LaGrange County's delegate to the convention writing Indiana's new constitution. When the exclusion clause came up he spoke against it and voted against it, and lost, ninety-four to thirty-six.

The men who wrote the Institute's prospectus in 1837 had said the thing thirteen years before he had to argue it.

Their school never said whether it had done it.