The village with the college in it

Nobody who taught school in this county in the 1840s had trained to do it.

A district hired whoever would take the job at the price it could pay, and the prices are on the record. Ten dollars a month and boarding round, which meant living a week at a time in the houses of the families whose children you taught. Ten shillings a week for a summer term. Two bushels of corn a week, paid to the man you boarded with.

The buildings were what the district could put up. Slabs laid across pins driven into the wall logs for desks, seats without backs, and at Denny's Corners one end of the room was the fireplace and there was no chimney but a hole in the roof.

Whoever stood in front of those children had learned to teach by teaching.

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The fix, when it came, was to gather the teachers up.

An institute was a week or two in one place. Teachers came in from their districts, were taught how to teach by somebody who knew, and went back. It sounds modest and it was the machinery that trained Indiana's teachers for the rest of the century.

According to this county's own history, the first one in the state was held here.

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At Ontario, in 1846, with a normal school the following year.

Ontario was the right place for it. The village sat in Lima Township and the LaGrange Collegiate Institute stood just across the line in Bloomfield, founded in 1837 by men who meant to build a college in the West on the Oberlin model. By 1846 it had been teaching for seven years.

If anywhere in this county was going to hold the state's first gathering of teachers, it was the village with the college in it.

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The trouble is that nobody has ever been able to say who held it.

The county history gives the claim in the passive and names nobody. The honour is claimed for the county, it says, rather than saying anybody held anything.

The man who wrote that chapter was Dr. John H. Rerick, a LaGrange physician who signed eight of the volume's chapters and owned the county's newspaper. He had a habit, visible all through his work, of marking the difference between what he knew and what he had been told. Writing up the county's dead he set down what his list left out, and why he could not fix it.

there is no official record of these, and it is impossible to obtain all their names

On this he used the marker too.

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Twenty-six years later the school itself published a history of what it had done, and the institute is not in it.

The 1872 catalogue was printed at LaGrange, and partway through it stops and asks how far the Institute had realised the design of its founders, and the answer concedes what it failed at: no collegiate department, no theological department, not technically a manual labour school, only one of the contemplated departments ever organised.

Then it lists what it did keep. Female students given as good opportunities as males. Graduates of its Bible class approved as ministers. A student who spent twenty-five years as a missionary to China.

It does not mention a teachers' institute. Not in that answer, not in the founding narrative, not anywhere in the volume.

A school listing its accomplishments does not leave out having hosted the first of something in the state.

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The date itself is not the problem.

Mishawaka had a normal institute going in 1846, the same year. Gatherings of that informal kind were being held in several states by then, so 1846 at Ontario would be early rather than impossible.

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The village is gone. The Institute's affairs were placed in the hands of a receiver and wound up in 1881, and the building came down. Ontario appears on no fire insurance map in any year, because there was never enough of it to insure.

So this is what the record holds: one sentence, in the passive, with no name attached, about something that would have happened in a village that no longer exists, at a school that never claimed it.

If somebody in this county knows differently, the archive would like to hear it.

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