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1836 – c. 1900
Union Township's first school-house was a log structure built in 1836 on the corner of James Moon's farm, and its first school was a subscription school of about twenty scholars. Chapman (1880), Union Township chapter, "The Schools," pp. 951–952, read first-hand: "The first school-house in the township was a log structure built in 1836, on the corner of James Moon's farm… The first school was taught in the winter of 1836-'7, by James Roberson, of South Bend. This was a subscription school, and was attended by about 20 scholars. The second teacher was John Hardy." Howard (1907) agrees on the year and the construction — the first school-house "erected in 1836… built of logs, with split slabs laid together for a floor" — and names no location and no teacher; the two histories' carriage of the same school is registered as a conflict of detail's register and printed whole there. The 1875 Atlas's Union Township sketch independently corroborates the site: "the first school-house was made of split logs, on Moon's farm." Beyond the first house, the reached record names district school-houses only where another leg's business touches them: the Olive Branch school-house, where the Advent Society met before 1862 and the Huggart children attended (its own article below), and Annis' school-house on the Turkey Creek road, where an unnamed society met (the Religion section carries that passage). A numbered list of the township's district schools — numbers, names, section locations, closing dates — is not established: the 1875 Atlas's Union maps (pp. 62–63) and directory pages (pp. 84, 90–91) do not render their schoolhouse symbols legibly in the transcription this build reads, and the full list banks as a named gap, its settler the Archive.org page images of those Atlas pages read directly.