First classrooms: the subscription school, the select school, and Institute No. 1, 1834–1854

1834–1868 · the system's founding generation

The first school: Mishawaka's schooling begins, on the record the schools themselves keep, in 1834 — a small class taught by a Miss Thatcher in a private home, in the iron-works village's first years. The high school's own published history and the 1924 edition of its yearbook, the Miskodeed, agree on the shape of it: one room, pupils of all ages together, a teacher remembered by surname only, who taught three years. The 1931 Miskodeed places the first schoolhouse on the north side of the river. It was a subscription-age school in a furnace town of a few hundred people, and it is the seed from which the graded corporation grew.

The select school and Mr. Butts: In 1843, on the schools' own history, George Merrifield opened a select school in the Methodist church on Main Street — a fee school of the period's usual kind, taught in borrowed sacred space. In 1844 a Mr. Butts began teaching, and in 1848 the town built its first brick schoolhouse: Institute No. 1, of five rooms, on South Main Street just north of the New York Central tracks. Butts was employed by the town as superintendent — the first superintendent of record in the system's history — with Jacob Merrifield, Jefferson Merrifield and a Miss Skinner as assistants. By 1854 a Mr. Foster was principal of the school at a salary of $850 a year, a figure the yearbook history preserves because it marked the school's arrival as a going institution with a paid head.

What the founding generation built: The pattern set in these two decades lasted: a town that built in brick early, hired a superintendent before it had a system in the modern sense, and kept its school history in its own yearbooks — the Miskodeed volumes of the 1920s and 1930s, which print the early history as the school's own memory, are among this section's governing sources, read first-hand.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka High School, "History of Mishawaka High School," the school's own history page, School City of Mishawaka (mhs.mishawakaschools.com).
2. The Miskodeed, Mishawaka High School yearbook, 1924, 1929, 1930 and 1931 editions, "The Mishawaka Schools" history sections, via the Internet Archive.