The brick school of 1865 and the building that replaced it

SPRING 1865 – 1914/1915 · THE GRADED SCHOOL ON THE OSCEOLA SCHOOL SITE · ITS REPLACEMENT'S YEAR IN CONFLICT

The one-room era in Osceola ends in brick: in the spring of 1865, Kiracofe records, a new brick school was built on the site of the present Osceola School — two rooms, in service for over fifty years. It was torn down, Kiracofe says, in 1915, "to make way for a new building which is still in service and has been in service for over 50 years also" — the new building being the Osceola School whose 1963 description the next entry gives. The Ball State Teachers College study of November 25, 1963, describing that same building from the corporation's own records, dates its original portion to 1914, with additions completed in 1922 and 1927. The one-year difference is printed whole and unharmonized: Kiracofe, writing the town's history from local record and memory, puts the old building's demolition in 1915; the Ball State surveyors, measuring the plant for the young corporation, put the new building's erection in 1914. Construction begun in one year and finished in the next would reconcile them, but no source reached says that, and this section does not say it for them. What is not in conflict: by the time the corporation inherited the building it was a brick school of eight classrooms on a four-acre site in the town, two of its rooms below grade in a sub-basement — the plant the 1865 school had grown into, on the same ground the 1865 builders chose.

Sources:

1. J. Harold Kiracofe, "The History of Osceola, Indiana," The History Museum: the brick school of spring 1865, its fifty years, and the 1915 demolition.
2. Ball State Teachers College, A Cooperative Study of Organizational, Building, and Financial Needs of Penn-Harris-Madison School Corporation, School Services Series No. 10 (November 25, 1963), Ball State University digital repository: the 1914 erection and the 1922 and 1927 additions.