The old schoolhouse is the back room

Somebody drew a schoolhouse on the map of Bloomfield Township in 1874 and did not write down what it was called.

It sits at the corner of two roads in the northwest corner of section 27, on land the atlas letters to E. W. Bigelow, with an A. Hoff lettered across the road in section 21 and an Abraham Hoff in section 22 to the north. The surveyors drew it in elevation rather than in plan, a small gabled building with a belfry on the ridge and a fence along the front, which is how that atlas draws a school. Elsewhere on the same sheet the identical drawing carries a printed name, Pleasant Hill Sch. This one carries nothing.

No source found gives the date that building was put up. The 1874 map is the earliest record of it there is.

Nineteen years later the corner has a name. The 1893 atlas sets a solid black star on the same spot and letters it HOFF S.H., and the land has passed from Bigelow to Chas. E. Sears.

---

In about 1874, the year of that first map, the town of LaGrange hired a schoolman.

Alonzo D. Mohler was twenty-six, born in Montgomery County, Ohio, the eldest of ten. His father Amos was a carpenter who had taken up contracting and building and had moved the family to Huntington in 1865. Mohler learned the carpenter's trade from him and then served an apprenticeship at cabinet making, and he paid for his degree at Asbury University by working at the cabinet maker's bench in the afternoons. He graduated in 1873, took the Muncie high school for a year, and came to LaGrange to take charge of its public schools.

Battey's county history lists the men who had charge of those schools and ends the list with Mohler, giving him seven years, the longest term on it.

He went to the Lima school in 1881, bought an interest in the Huntington Herald in 1883, and was elected superintendent of schools for Huntington County in 1885. Then the trade he had been raised in took him back. The Fort Wayne directory for 1893 and 1894 prints him in its Huntington section as Mohler Alonzo D, architect, 4 E Market, res 141 Guilford, and the Huntington directories that follow list him at the same house under the trade heading Architects, with Amos, carpenter, living a few streets away.

When he died in May 1911 a column of DePauw notes in the Greencastle Herald ran through the whole of it, Muncie and LaGrange and Lima, the county superintendency and the newspaper, and then closed with one sentence. In addition to his other interests, he had gained a wide reputation as an architect.

---

In 1904 the township trustee, Andrew Decker, built onto the school at this corner. The architect was Mohler, twenty-three years after he had left the LaGrange schools.

What was built is the part of the building a passer-by sees: two schoolrooms on the north front with a hallway running between them, over a basement dug to hold the furnace, the well and the wash basins. The front rooms would take forty pupils each and were for the high school and the upper grades.

The old schoolhouse was not pulled down. It was kept, and it became the room at the back, seating forty-five for the younger children.

The contemporary account of the work is a report in the LaGrange County Democrat of 9 December 1904, which said the building was then nearing completion. Neither issue has been read for this piece. The words quoted from it here are quoted as the National Register nomination quotes them. The nomination says that Decker gave the work his personal attention and that he had procured…an excellent building. The nomination also records, from the same paper of 30 December 1904, that the school was dedicated later that month with an address by David Geeting, then a former state superintendent. It was Geeting who, as superintendent in 1898, had called for consolidation and for the closing of the one-room schools.

---

The building says the rest itself.

On either side of the entrance, in the brick, there are the outlines of two windows that have been filled in. The nomination reads them as likely the original front windows, from when the south room was a one-room schoolhouse, before a hallway and two rooms were built across that front and the old wall became an inside wall.

So the schoolhouse that stood at this corner before 1904 is still standing. It is the back room.

Whether it is the very building drawn on the 1874 map is not something any source reached can say. The nomination thinks it likely, and puts the original at about 1874 on the strength of that map and the 1893 one, while stating outright that it could not determine when the building was put up.

---

The corner has been spelled two ways for as long as anyone has written it down.

Every map that names the place letters it Hoff. The 1893 atlas sets HOFF S.H. The United States Geological Survey letters Hoff Sch on the Mongo quadrangle in 1947 and again in 1960. Indiana's own directory of school officials prints Hoff School in 1913.

The other spelling is in the 1893 atlas too. Its list of the county's patrons enters an Abraham Huff against section 21, the section beside the corner. The 1874 plate letters an Abraham Hoff in section 22, just north of the corner. Whether those are one man or two is not something either book says.

---

Ford's history of this corner of Indiana prints what the county superintendent returned for the school year 1918 and 1919. Under the heading for the county's consolidated and graded schools, the Bloomfield Township line reads three rooms and seventy-seven pupils enrolled, sixteen of them in the high school, on a two-year course, taught by one man and two women.

Three rooms. Two of them were fourteen years old and one of them was older than anybody could say.

---

In 1961 the townships around LaGrange were gathered into the Lakeland School Corporation, and the following year it put an addition on Parkside Elementary in town to take the pupils from this building. The school at the corner closed at the end of that school year, in 1962. It was the last one working in Bloomfield Township outside the town of LaGrange.

Sixty years later, on the fifteenth of November 2022, it was entered on the National Register of Historic Places, and the period the listing covers runs from about 1874, for the building nobody can date, to 1962.

The owners of this building are clients of the Gazette's publisher.