The township district century: fourteen districts, fourteen one-room schools

1832–1959 · THE TRUSTEE'S SCHOOLS, FROM KIRACOFE'S HISTORY OF OSCEOLA

Schooling on this ground begins as a township act: in the fall of 1832, the year Penn Township itself was laid out, the township was divided into fourteen school districts. The first school in the vicinity stood about a mile and a half south of Osceola, near Mr. Rabb's residence at the intersection of Apple and Inwood Roads — a log schoolhouse whose fireplace took eight-foot logs, teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; Kiracofe's manuscript history, citing the School Commissioners' Record Book No. 1 (p. 30), records the sale of the township's school section, Section 16, on March 21, 1833, at $1.25 an acre — a single-source manuscript citation, the only carrier the record reached; The Land's caution carries, the land endowment that underwrote the district system. After Indiana's free-school law of April 1853, the one-room schools went up across the township, and J. Harold Kiracofe's History of Osceola (The History Museum; the text is internally dated to January 1968) names all fourteen: Osceola (his spelling "Osecola"), Vesey, Russ, Pleasant Valley, Willow Creek, Dutch Island, Sunnydale, Elm Grove, Dixon, Tamarack, Ferrisville, Van Buskirk, Coalbush, and Eby — "all one-room buildings with outside 'plumbing'." Osceola's own was the District Number 5 School, built in the early 1850s on what is now Lincolnway West, near Grand Avenue; it was later moved east on Lincolnway into the town, and Kiracofe follows the little building through its afterlives — remodeled successively as a residence, a barber shop, a used-car garage, and a plumbing shop, ending a few feet west of Henderson's Barber Shop; in 1884–85 the blacksmith Mr. Baker was living in the former schoolhouse. The neighbors print at the size the history gives them. The Vesey School — the old South School, on the north side of Inwood Road about halfway between Apple and Beech Roads — was replaced early in the 1860s by a newer building on the same site, and that building was in its turn moved into Osceola as a private residence, still in use around 1968 as the first house east of Apple Road on the south side of Washington Street; the school took its name from the Vesey family of South Apple Road. The Willow Creek school, north of the river, began as a school kept by the widow of Dr. George W. Fowler in her log cabin; a frame schoolhouse went up on John McKnight's land in 1837 and burned in 1848, having no chimney. The Tamarack School stood in deep woods south of the marsh near the present Tamarack Church site — the only school with kerosene lights, and host to the Tamarack Lyceum in the late 1850s. Graded classes came to Penn Township's schools in the fall of 1879 and were in use in all of them by the fall of 1881, the township among the first in the county to grade. The name-to-number mapping for the other thirteen districts, and the one-room schools' closing years as the graded buildings gathered the children in, were not found in the record reached; they ride as named gaps (GAP-OSSCH-1), settled by the township trustee's records and the county superintendent's reports.

Sources:

1. J. Harold Kiracofe, "The History of Osceola, Indiana," The History Museum (historymuseumsb.org), text internally dated January 1968: the fourteen districts, the fourteen schools, District No. 5 whole, Vesey, Willow Creek, Tamarack, the Section 16 sale, and the grading dates.
2. Town of Osceola, "History" page: excerpts of the same History Museum material, provided with permission September 15, 2014.