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1820s – 1950s
What they were: For most of the nineteenth century most Allen County children were taught in district schools run by their township trustees — one-room schoolhouses numbered by district and scattered at road intervals across the townships outside the city. Inside Fort Wayne the city system grew; outside it, the township school was the system.
Course: The record keeps some of their names because later schools inherited their ground. Washington Township's District 5 school, the "Fox" schoolhouse, stood where Elmhurst High School later rose (third rung). Washington Township's old township school building at Spy Run and Ruth became Rudisill School in 1906. The township era around the city ended in the consolidation decades: Wayne Township's schools joined Fort Wayne Community Schools in 1958–60, and the 1959 state reorganization folded the remaining township schools into the county corporations (third rung, the county ring).
Sources:
- Ted Shideler, Allen County school histories (Elmhurst; District 5 "Fox" schoolhouse).
- ACGSI, Rudisill School page (Washington Township school conversion, 1906).