David S. Heath House

Sacred as an original parchment on W'hich are penned words of Holy Writ is an old record of the town meetings of Boston ' in which was written "on the thirteenth of the second month, 1635," the historic declaration : "At a general meeting upon imbliiiiie notice it was geuerallv aj;i(H'd upon that our brother, Philemon Parniost, shall be entreated to become schoolmaster for the teaching and nourtering of the children among us." On the l*;>d of Ajtrii following this declaration the first public school in America was opened. Two hundred and one years had i)assed, when, in an old log cabin which stood where the ''silent city of the dead"' just south of Oxford is now located, Samuel McConnell opened the first school taught in what is now JJenton county. In the winter of 183(5-7 he taught a three months" school, receiving as his pay two dollars for each jiu))!! that attended during the term.

Passage source: Progress of Education in Benton County, Indiana : with an Explanation of the Indiana School System and the Duties of School Officers, Patrons and Pupils, published 1906.

Joshua Dean, William Wakeman, Hiram Stove, Francis Bovnton and Benjamin F. Coffenberry lived in district five and were the fathers of twenty-five children of school age. No schoolhouse was built in this district before 1S52, but one was luiilt soon afterwards. Previous to that time the children of the district attended school at the Martin home (see Grant) or went to the house built in Oak Grove in 1844. In September, 1849, range seven was organized as a school township and the part of that range now in Oak Grove was divided into districts one and two. District one was three by four miles, containing the north two-thirds of the west half of range seven, and district two contained the six sections south of one. Oxford was laid out in district one in which, in 1850, lived H. T. Howard, John Ferguson, James McClure. Stephen Buckley, I. H. Holton, Samuel Callahan, Aaron Wood, William Higgins, Charles Wakeman, W. T. Rowe, James Crosson, Basil Justus, J. F. Parker, David Cell, James Howarth, E. McConnell and Isaac Templeton, parents or guardians of the fifty-five school children then in the district. In district two then lived Thomas Atkinson, Thomas Owen, Robert Foster, AYilliam Norton, William Cochran, Henry Bowers and Tliomas Lewis, who had thirty-one children of school age within their homes.

Passage source: Progress of Education in Benton County, Indiana : with an Explanation of the Indiana School System and the Duties of School Officers, Patrons and Pupils, published 1906.

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 Oak Grove Township - 3,316 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.