Big Springs, Indiana

As carly as 1720 the French traders had established a trading post at Thorntown, being one of the system of posts extending from the valley of the St. Lawrence to that of the Lower Mississippi. In 1800, it is said, the town included thirty-six trading houses or stores, and was the home of a branch. of the Miami Indians. The white population up to this time seems to have included only males, and no attempt was made toestablish society or to found schools and churches.

Passage source: Early Life and Times in Boone County Indiana, published 1861.

Beclar, in Eagle Township, and about the same time a log school house was built in the new town of Thorntown, and Jefferson Hillis was engaged as teacher at the latter point. These two were the first houses erected, built especially for school purposes, within the county. The same year the first school in Washington Township was taught by Daniel Ellis, in a deserted settler's cabin, on the south bank of Sugar Creek just a few rods south of the subsequent site of the Chase or Ben Crose mill. In this same winter of 1832, the first school in Marion Township was taught in a eabin on the farm of John Pan, just north of Big Springs. It was not till 1836 that the first public schoo] house was built in Marion Township, being situated upon the farm of John Wright, not far from the present site of School No. 2. Within these years, from 1832 to 1837, private schools were carried on in all the new settlements. In Jefferson and Union townships as early as 1833, and in the southwest part of Jackson Township in 1835, schools had been established, and rudimentary instruction was given pupils who came through the tangled forests and swampy by-ways to gain what knowledge was then opened to them. Allof the schools in the county were at this time carried on by subscription on the settlers who, from their seanty means cheerfully gave, and, each in turn, boarded the teacher for the sake of giving their children a measure of preparation for the wider range of duties to devolve upon them with the development of the country. In 18385 the first school in Clinton Township had been established in a deserted cabin in the Mud Creek settlement, northwest of Elizaville, with J. H. Sample as teacher. The following year witnessed the first school in Perry Township, being in a cabin in the northwestern part of the township. In the year 1837 the first school in Worth Township, and probably the first free school in the county, was taught in a cabin on the farm of James McCord, the teacher being Henry Lucas, and the teacher being paid by the county. In the autumn of this same year a subscription school of two or three months' duration was taught by Pleasant Crawford in Harrison Town- ship. This was the first school taught in that township. From this time on the growth of the schools in the county kept pace with that of the population. In 1824 the legislature had enacted a law to establish school houses, of which two provisions were as follows:

Passage source: Early Life and Times in Boone County Indiana, published 1861.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Zionsville Town.