The township district era: log houses, numbered districts, and the trustee's schools

1830s–1963 · Harris and Clay townships

The first schools on this ground were neighborhood undertakings before they were public ones: Timothy Edward Howard's 1907 county history, read first-hand, preserves the Harris Township beginning from the settler record. The township's first school-house was a log building fourteen by sixteen feet, with a large fireplace whose back-log and fore-stick rested on and-irons, and a stick-and-mud chimney. Its first school master was Robert Kennedy — himself on the township's settler roll — who afterwards removed to St. Edward, Nebraska. Howard gives the detail and moves on; Harris's churches and its 1900 population of 481 (the town of Granger included) fill out his section, and he prints no roll of the district schools that followed. For Clay Township, Howard's seventh section records the parallel beginning from Mr. Bulla's reminiscences, his history's source for the township's early chapters: the first school in Clay was taught in Mr. Eyler's house by Charles Murray, and the first school house stood at the location later known as Stover's, on the Edwardsburg road, its teacher Daniel A. Veasey. Clay's 1900 population was 1,150, Notre Dame and St. Mary's included — the two Holy Cross foundations at the township's west, whose own schools belong to South Bend's build, not this one.

The system those log houses grew into was Indiana's district system: under the state's common-school framework, each civil township was a school township under its elected trustee, divided into numbered districts, each district with its own schoolhouse set within walking distance of the farms it served, and Section 16 of every township reserved from the federal survey for the schools' support — the Land leg of this build carries Section 16's course on this ground whole, including the named gap (its G-9) where the sale instruments for Harris's section rest in records no source reached could print. The district map of the two townships on this ground — how many districts each carried, their numbers, their schoolhouse sites, and the year-by-year closings as pupils were hauled to central schools — is the one part of this section the reachable record would not settle whole, and it stands as a named gap below rather than as a reconstruction. What the record does fix is the era's shape and its end. Through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the one-room districts gave way, township by township, to consolidation: the trustee built a central graded school and the district houses closed around it. On this ground the consolidation monuments are dated buildings — the Harris School of 1928 and the Mary Frank School of 1958, each carried in its own entry below — and on the Clay side the township's schools ran the same course into the South Bend corporation's system as the city grew around them, a course that belongs to South Bend's build and is boundary-printed in this section's closing entry.

Named gap — the district roll: the district-by-district enumeration of Harris and Clay township schools (names, district numbers, sites, opening and closing years) could not be settled from any source first-hand. Joseph County Superintendent of Schools' annual school directories and reports (county record, held in the St. Joseph County Public Library's local history collections); the Indiana Department of Public Instruction's biennial reports, whose statistical tables count schools, teachers, and enrollment township by township; the township plates of the 1875 Higgins, Belden & Co. illustrated atlas of the county, which mark schoolhouse sites district by district; and the Harris and Clay township trustees' own records.

Sources:

1. Timothy Edward Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Lewis Publishing, 1907), vol. 1: ch. VIII, sec. 3 (Harris — the 14-by-16-foot log school-house, the fireplace and mud chimney, first school master Robert Kennedy; township formed January 5, 1836; 1900 population 481), and the Clay Township section (first school taught by Charles Murray in Mr. Eyler's house; first school house at Stover's on the Edwardsburg road, teacher Daniel A. Veasey, from Mr. Bulla's reminiscences; township formed May 5, 1840; 1900 population 1,150), read first-hand.
2. The Land and Before the City legs of this build (the Section 16 frame and its named gap G-9), cross-referenced.