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1834–1880 · the school's founding generation
The township's first schoolmaster arrived, Chapman says, on a date that never happened. Samuel Bate was born in 1801, son of Joseph and Priscilla (Ayers) Bate of New Jersey, educated in subscription schools, and teaching from the age of eighteen. He married Harmony Allen in 1830 — she died in 1860 and lies beside him at Hamilton — and "arrived in this county 'Sept. 31, 1834,'" as Chapman prints it: September has thirty days, and the impossible date prints here as the record's own, flagged and uncorrected, because the error is itself part of what the record is. Bate taught three terms in the township, then farmed two farms; his son Martin Bate (born 1831 in Greene County, Ohio) farmed 163 acres on Section 31. Two generations later the town school was run by Professor Albert E. Rowell, born 22 July 1823 in New York, a teacher since seventeen, nine years in one building at Battle Creek, Michigan, proposed by "many parties" for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and in 1880 "principal of the New Carlisle public school" with three assistants under him and his wife Harriet teaching in the same building. The schools leg's file carries the institutions; the two men bracket its first half-century.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), sketches of Samuel Bate, Martin Bate and Prof. Albert E. Rowell, pp. 772, 783; schools matter, p. 768.
- DAR cemetery inscriptions, Hamilton: Samuel Bate and Harmony Bate stones.