The following short blog is an attempt to share school pictures for Marion County, Ohio's "Scott Township Local School", better known in the county as "Kirkpatrick" or simply "Kirk".
Prior to WWI, Ohio's system of one-room schoolhouses operated by the townships was becoming outmoded.
Educational reforms were focused on retaining students beyond the eighth-grade year, which had been the traditional end of education for many male children who were needed in the work economy for many families. Once child labor laws went into effect, student retention became a national endeavor.
Additional national reforms were changing the look and feel of education in cities, and Ohio experienced a boom in new school construction from 1910-1929. In Columbus, Ohio, a joint venture between the Columbus Public Schools and The Ohio State University joint formed an experimental school - a "junior" high school to house students in the seventh through ninth grade years. Indianola Junior High became the first such school. Eventually, the reformers reformed the junior high concept into the middle school structure of placing sixth through eighth-grade students together.
All of this reform posed a challenge for primitive rural schools. Rural districts, unable to build modern schools at all the locations of the one-room buildings, which would have been unrealistic, began the process of consolidation of their schools into modern buildings that would serve either a town or a township. These buildings would also bring in such modern conveniences as heat and running water. Teachers were hired with college degrees and were paid professional wages. Breaking grades into smaller groupings would help teachers teach in a more cohesive fashion.
While Marion County's Scott Township had unbelievably good, rich farmland, but what it lacked was a true functioning town. And Letimberville, Ohio, had three strikes against it.
Two things were needed for a town to form around and survive. One was transportation - and Scott Township lacked a rail stop for a town to form around. While Letimberville (later Kirkptrack) was on the early stage routes, the railroads bypassed it to the east where a siding at Tobias Station was built for commodities shipping. So Kirkpatrick was east, and Tobias station was west, and the two never met.
The second thing needed for a town was a reliable source of ample water, which was one of the reasons why a true rail stop was never considered for the township in the era of steam locomotives. Water ran the economies of many Ohio communities and aside from ditch systems, there was not a flowing solution for Scott Township. Everyone in the region was served by water wells that pumped out foul-smelling mineral-rich water. While this would have been a boon to a European Spa, in rural Ohio, the sulfur smelling water, which still leaves facets encrusted with a mineral build-up wasn't a valued asset.
The Township did have a community with a post office - Letimberville, located on the Columbus-Sandusky Pike - for a while. There was at any time a small store and blacksmith shop, and two churches. One of the Churches was Methodist Episcopal, the other Christian. There was also an attempt to run an inn for the stage lines that would come through in the mid-1800s.
However, the real problem facing Letimberville was the evangelical nature of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the 1830s a wave of Methodist Episcopal adherents swept into the region and bought large portions of land in northern Scott, Township in Marion County, and in Dallas and Bucyrus Townships to the north. Led by Reverend Jeremiah Crabb Monnett, these families from Ross and Pickaway Counties to the south of Columbus, were strict followers of a dogma that banned anything sinful, especially "demon rum". They approved of education, but they crusaded against such things as dancing, card playing, and theaters. They conducted revivals that would put Billy Sunday and his antics to shame. These revivals went on for days, in the hot sun, or in the cold wind. And everyone attended.
Things came to a point where the inn in Letimberville and its sale of liquor needed to end, and this was done by raids under the auspices of the wives of the congregations who smashed the place to smithereens with hatchets in the middle of the night. One account has the ladies sending their hired men into the inns, holding the innkeeper and his wife at gunpoint while they destroyed the poor couple's livelihood. Then, the job is done, they merrily returned to the house of one of their leaders for tea, cakes and bible reading. Eventually, the inn was converted to a house and that was that.
Even into the 1960s, Scott Township had an extremely high membership rate Ohio's Women Christian Temperance Union efforts to keep the area dry.
So without a train, without businesses and industry, and without a local waterhole, Letimberville, withered. Even after changing the name to Kirkpatrick in hopes of starting fresh, the legacy lived on. Kirkpatrick was a place to go to on Sunday for church, or a place to send their children to school, or even travel through if traveling by wagon and later car.
But not much more.
So when the township decided to build a school at Kirkpatrick, half-hearted hopes were high and a few houses were built on speculation.
But even the school building at Kirkpatrick was a half-hearted building because it was half a building. The local board built one half of an eight classroom building, and it was the back half at that. The front facade along St. Rt. 98 was windowless, and only sported a pair of front doors. All classroom windows faced east. Only basement windows faced north or south. This writer has done extensive research on the school, and has never seen a picture of the inside of the school, or the east facade. Only grainy pictures of the windowless front.
The idea was that as the student population merited, then the district would finish the building, and the structure would get a proper front, with offices, perhaps a library. But for the beginning, half a building was enough. This meant that the district could operate with being burdened by an insurmountable debt placed on the shoulders of farmers. Remember, there were no industries that could pay a tax on land. So farmers bore the burden, so half a school was better than none. It was a prudent decision.
There was also no money for a gym for the new school. For that, the township turned to its township hall - a small barnlike looking building that had a finished hall for meetings. A gym floor was installed and students shuttled out a door in the school and walked the twenty feet to the township hall for gym and sports games.
Scott Township School also lacked something important. An accreditation to graduate 12th-grade seniors in all of its years, except one. This was partly because of the tight budgets and small size. So the school held a graduation ceremony at the end of 11th grade, and then students chose which of the regional schools it could to attend for 12th grade. Students scattered - some went to Marion Harding in the county seat, others chose Bucyrus, while others went to other rural schools at Mt. Zion, Claridon, and Morral, Ohio.
Into all of this came the post World War I commodities depression that hit the farming economy in the United States. While something the Great Depression started in the 1929 Stock Market crash, for American farmers, the farm economy collapsed in 1920-1921. Overproduction of wheat, corn - the primary crops at the time, and a flood of livestock sank markets for producers as the standard of living of non-farmers raised going into the 1920s. Framers had struggled in the U.S. since the 1890s, but the post-war economy meant that the Great Depression was nine years old for farmers before the market crashed. So for Scott Township, margins for families were razor-thin, and family size began its decline.
In the 1920s, Crawford County's Dallas Township - the smallest township in that county - reached a deal that allowed its students above a certain grade to attend Kirkpatrick. Like Scott Township, its small size strapped it for cash. They had a modern but small building at Monnette, Ohio, - which also had a small station and post office - but the number students withered to the point where it was more economical to closed that school and divert to other districts.
When World War II broke out, the township was hit hard again. On March 2, 1942, the Federal Government took 11,000 acres of land in Scott, Grand Prairie and Marion Townships for the construction of the Scioto Ordnance Plant - an incendiary bomb-making facility. Families through all three townships were evicted, lock stock and barrel. The school student population at Kirkpatrick plunged as the township lost population from Likens Road, north to the "Iberia Pike", and from Pole Lane on the west to the Columbus Sandusky Pike. And the property tax dollars lost were not replaced to the township from 1942 to 1946. When farmers and speculators bought back the land, there were no tax arrears owed. It was a clean slate.
The Board hoped that things would rebound by the time the taken land was resold for farming, but that never happened. By the end of the forties, the school was closed, and by the 1960s the building was gone as well. Finally, in the late 1970s, the old township hall was replaced by small concrete block building.
All that is left of the school is a large empty lot. The farms in Scott township exist, but vacant land is farmed everywhere. Kirkpatrick now has running water - its piped in from Delaware, Ohio to the south.
Reader, remember - though a small district, with a small school, and a small student body, Kirk's students and the community were fiercely loyal to the place. For such a small school, they fielded highly competitive and successful basketball teams that won more county championships from 1925-1940 than most other larger Marion County Schools. The Kirk girls teams more often than naught played to standing room only. Not bad for a team that used every female student in the high school grades on the team.
While Kirkpatrick may not have been in a thriving community, it was its own thriving school community for as long as it could be.
My mother, until her dying day was a Kirkpatrick booster - they were some of the happiest days of her life.
But now when I go back, everyone and everything that I remember as a child is gone. The farms and barns are gone, the families have all changed. My mother and her two older brothers are gone, and so are their families. So for me, I can drive past Joe Vogel's old family farm, but I am one of the few who remembers the bachelor who lived with his brothers and sister in a neat as a pin place. And even the surviving Kirkpatrick students are almost all gone. Those still with us are well into their late seventies and beyond. My Aunt Harriett - who was in one of the two final classes through Kirkpatrick in 1948, died in 1953. My other aunt is, at the time I write this, 105, and is the oldest living person who remembers the school, though she lives in the west with my cousin.
So a way of life and a community are gone.
Thomas Wolfe was right - you can't go home again - especially when there is no place to call home anymore.
Prior to WWI, Ohio's system of one-room schoolhouses operated by the townships was becoming outmoded.
Educational reforms were focused on retaining students beyond the eighth-grade year, which had been the traditional end of education for many male children who were needed in the work economy for many families. Once child labor laws went into effect, student retention became a national endeavor.
Additional national reforms were changing the look and feel of education in cities, and Ohio experienced a boom in new school construction from 1910-1929. In Columbus, Ohio, a joint venture between the Columbus Public Schools and The Ohio State University joint formed an experimental school - a "junior" high school to house students in the seventh through ninth grade years. Indianola Junior High became the first such school. Eventually, the reformers reformed the junior high concept into the middle school structure of placing sixth through eighth-grade students together.
All of this reform posed a challenge for primitive rural schools. Rural districts, unable to build modern schools at all the locations of the one-room buildings, which would have been unrealistic, began the process of consolidation of their schools into modern buildings that would serve either a town or a township. These buildings would also bring in such modern conveniences as heat and running water. Teachers were hired with college degrees and were paid professional wages. Breaking grades into smaller groupings would help teachers teach in a more cohesive fashion.
While Marion County's Scott Township had unbelievably good, rich farmland, but what it lacked was a true functioning town. And Letimberville, Ohio, had three strikes against it.
Two things were needed for a town to form around and survive. One was transportation - and Scott Township lacked a rail stop for a town to form around. While Letimberville (later Kirkptrack) was on the early stage routes, the railroads bypassed it to the east where a siding at Tobias Station was built for commodities shipping. So Kirkpatrick was east, and Tobias station was west, and the two never met.
The second thing needed for a town was a reliable source of ample water, which was one of the reasons why a true rail stop was never considered for the township in the era of steam locomotives. Water ran the economies of many Ohio communities and aside from ditch systems, there was not a flowing solution for Scott Township. Everyone in the region was served by water wells that pumped out foul-smelling mineral-rich water. While this would have been a boon to a European Spa, in rural Ohio, the sulfur smelling water, which still leaves facets encrusted with a mineral build-up wasn't a valued asset.
The Township did have a community with a post office - Letimberville, located on the Columbus-Sandusky Pike - for a while. There was at any time a small store and blacksmith shop, and two churches. One of the Churches was Methodist Episcopal, the other Christian. There was also an attempt to run an inn for the stage lines that would come through in the mid-1800s.
However, the real problem facing Letimberville was the evangelical nature of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the 1830s a wave of Methodist Episcopal adherents swept into the region and bought large portions of land in northern Scott, Township in Marion County, and in Dallas and Bucyrus Townships to the north. Led by Reverend Jeremiah Crabb Monnett, these families from Ross and Pickaway Counties to the south of Columbus, were strict followers of a dogma that banned anything sinful, especially "demon rum". They approved of education, but they crusaded against such things as dancing, card playing, and theaters. They conducted revivals that would put Billy Sunday and his antics to shame. These revivals went on for days, in the hot sun, or in the cold wind. And everyone attended.
Things came to a point where the inn in Letimberville and its sale of liquor needed to end, and this was done by raids under the auspices of the wives of the congregations who smashed the place to smithereens with hatchets in the middle of the night. One account has the ladies sending their hired men into the inns, holding the innkeeper and his wife at gunpoint while they destroyed the poor couple's livelihood. Then, the job is done, they merrily returned to the house of one of their leaders for tea, cakes and bible reading. Eventually, the inn was converted to a house and that was that.
Even into the 1960s, Scott Township had an extremely high membership rate Ohio's Women Christian Temperance Union efforts to keep the area dry.
So without a train, without businesses and industry, and without a local waterhole, Letimberville, withered. Even after changing the name to Kirkpatrick in hopes of starting fresh, the legacy lived on. Kirkpatrick was a place to go to on Sunday for church, or a place to send their children to school, or even travel through if traveling by wagon and later car.
But not much more.
So when the township decided to build a school at Kirkpatrick, half-hearted hopes were high and a few houses were built on speculation.
But even the school building at Kirkpatrick was a half-hearted building because it was half a building. The local board built one half of an eight classroom building, and it was the back half at that. The front facade along St. Rt. 98 was windowless, and only sported a pair of front doors. All classroom windows faced east. Only basement windows faced north or south. This writer has done extensive research on the school, and has never seen a picture of the inside of the school, or the east facade. Only grainy pictures of the windowless front.
The idea was that as the student population merited, then the district would finish the building, and the structure would get a proper front, with offices, perhaps a library. But for the beginning, half a building was enough. This meant that the district could operate with being burdened by an insurmountable debt placed on the shoulders of farmers. Remember, there were no industries that could pay a tax on land. So farmers bore the burden, so half a school was better than none. It was a prudent decision.
There was also no money for a gym for the new school. For that, the township turned to its township hall - a small barnlike looking building that had a finished hall for meetings. A gym floor was installed and students shuttled out a door in the school and walked the twenty feet to the township hall for gym and sports games.
Scott Township School also lacked something important. An accreditation to graduate 12th-grade seniors in all of its years, except one. This was partly because of the tight budgets and small size. So the school held a graduation ceremony at the end of 11th grade, and then students chose which of the regional schools it could to attend for 12th grade. Students scattered - some went to Marion Harding in the county seat, others chose Bucyrus, while others went to other rural schools at Mt. Zion, Claridon, and Morral, Ohio.
Into all of this came the post World War I commodities depression that hit the farming economy in the United States. While something the Great Depression started in the 1929 Stock Market crash, for American farmers, the farm economy collapsed in 1920-1921. Overproduction of wheat, corn - the primary crops at the time, and a flood of livestock sank markets for producers as the standard of living of non-farmers raised going into the 1920s. Framers had struggled in the U.S. since the 1890s, but the post-war economy meant that the Great Depression was nine years old for farmers before the market crashed. So for Scott Township, margins for families were razor-thin, and family size began its decline.
In the 1920s, Crawford County's Dallas Township - the smallest township in that county - reached a deal that allowed its students above a certain grade to attend Kirkpatrick. Like Scott Township, its small size strapped it for cash. They had a modern but small building at Monnette, Ohio, - which also had a small station and post office - but the number students withered to the point where it was more economical to closed that school and divert to other districts.
When World War II broke out, the township was hit hard again. On March 2, 1942, the Federal Government took 11,000 acres of land in Scott, Grand Prairie and Marion Townships for the construction of the Scioto Ordnance Plant - an incendiary bomb-making facility. Families through all three townships were evicted, lock stock and barrel. The school student population at Kirkpatrick plunged as the township lost population from Likens Road, north to the "Iberia Pike", and from Pole Lane on the west to the Columbus Sandusky Pike. And the property tax dollars lost were not replaced to the township from 1942 to 1946. When farmers and speculators bought back the land, there were no tax arrears owed. It was a clean slate.
The Board hoped that things would rebound by the time the taken land was resold for farming, but that never happened. By the end of the forties, the school was closed, and by the 1960s the building was gone as well. Finally, in the late 1970s, the old township hall was replaced by small concrete block building.
All that is left of the school is a large empty lot. The farms in Scott township exist, but vacant land is farmed everywhere. Kirkpatrick now has running water - its piped in from Delaware, Ohio to the south.
Reader, remember - though a small district, with a small school, and a small student body, Kirk's students and the community were fiercely loyal to the place. For such a small school, they fielded highly competitive and successful basketball teams that won more county championships from 1925-1940 than most other larger Marion County Schools. The Kirk girls teams more often than naught played to standing room only. Not bad for a team that used every female student in the high school grades on the team.
While Kirkpatrick may not have been in a thriving community, it was its own thriving school community for as long as it could be.
My mother, until her dying day was a Kirkpatrick booster - they were some of the happiest days of her life.
But now when I go back, everyone and everything that I remember as a child is gone. The farms and barns are gone, the families have all changed. My mother and her two older brothers are gone, and so are their families. So for me, I can drive past Joe Vogel's old family farm, but I am one of the few who remembers the bachelor who lived with his brothers and sister in a neat as a pin place. And even the surviving Kirkpatrick students are almost all gone. Those still with us are well into their late seventies and beyond. My Aunt Harriett - who was in one of the two final classes through Kirkpatrick in 1948, died in 1953. My other aunt is, at the time I write this, 105, and is the oldest living person who remembers the school, though she lives in the west with my cousin.
So a way of life and a community are gone.
Thomas Wolfe was right - you can't go home again - especially when there is no place to call home anymore.
Comments
Post a Comment