Lafayette Daily Courier
Saturday, November 19, 1859
OLD SETTLERS
"Having concluded my last number at Attica, I will next cross the river
to Williamsport, the county seat of Warren county, and draw a
daguerreotype of that town, and some of the old settlers of Warren as
far back as 1829-30.
The reader may wish to know why my peregrinations over Montgomery,
Tippecanoe, Fountain and Warren counties, were so extensive in those
early times? The question is easily answered. Being a school master, I
was, of course, abroad in the land, looking up the most densely settled
neighborhoods in the country, and it often took two or three of the
largest neighborhoods to furnish "scholars" enough for one good school.
I ought, perhaps, at an earlier stage of my chronicles, given the reader
a description of our schools in this region of country in those early
times. I now propose, with the reader's consent, to make amends for the
omission by giving a brief description of backwoods schools, school
houses, &c., before drawing my picture of Warren county and her pioneer
settlers.
The school house, which was generally a log cabin with puncheon floor,
cat-an-clay chimney, and a part of two logs chopped away on each side of
the house for windows, over which greased newspapers or foolscap was
pasted to admit the light, and keep out the cold. The house was
generally furnished with one split bottomed chair for the teacher, and
rude benches made out of slabs or puncheons for the pupils to sit upon,
so arranged as to get the benefit of the huge log fire in the Winter
time and the light from the windows. To these add a broom, water
bucket and tin cup or gourd, and the furniture list will be complete.
The books then in general use were: Webster's Elementary Spelling Book,
the Bible, English Reader and supplement to the same. Dillworth's and
Pike's Arithmetics, Murray's English, Grammar and any history of the
United States or geography that could be procured by the parents or
guardians of those who attended school. Maps, Charts, Atlases and
Geographies were much more scarce than at the present day. Parents and
guardians then did not have to run the gauntlet every quarter or two, to
buy a new atlas, grammar or arithmetic, to suit the taste of every new
teacher that successively swayed the birch in the district, at no little
pecuniary sacrifice, as well as at the destruction of all symmetry and
uniformity in the intellectual training of their children.
"Baker" was then spelled and pronounced the same way in all the books.
And the multiplication and enumeration tables were set down in figures
and diagrams just as they are now, nor have they changed a whit since I
was a boy. The nine digits and the three R's (toasted by an American
Tittlebat Titmouse as the initial letters for Reading, R-iting, and
R-ithmetic), were then great institutions in the land as well as now.
The appropriate and classic lessons contained in the text books used in
those schools were indelibly impressed upon the memories of the
learners, and lasted during life. Who does not remember the fable of
the "old man who found a rude boy upon one of his apple trees, stealing
apples?" Of the fox, that was entangled in the bramble, by the bank of
the river, and came near being destroyed by flies, and when assistance
was offered it, declined it for the reason that a "more hungry swarm"
might pounce upon him, and suck away all his blood. And the story and
picture of poor dog Tray, who got "severely whipped for being caught in
bad company," and other like useful and instructive lessons, containing
the best of morals, which loom like mile posts along the pathway of the
past.
In my humble opinion, there was more system and uniformity in the
education of the youth of those days than there is at the present time.
The young man educated in any portion of our government, knew the
elementary course of reading and studies pursued by any other, and all
other students in the Union, from Maine to Louisiana, and from the
shores of the Atlantic to the most remote log school house in the West,
thus the better-enabling the citizens of our widespread and common
country to understand and appreciate each other; drawing lessons, and
sentiments, and household words, from the same books.
There were then no one hundred and one different spelling books,
grammars and geographies to bewilder and discourage the young mind with
varieties, resembling Hubiras' description of conglomeration: "An
ill-baked mass of heterogeneous matter, to form which all the devils
spewed the batter."
That great improvements have been made in the art of teaching, as well
as in the arts and sciences taught, within the last quarter of a
century, none will deny. Mental arithmetic, the outline maps, the
introduction of the of the black-board, and mathematical and
philosophical apparatus into the schools has greatly facilitated the
acquisition of learning--rendering it easier for both teacher and
student, and enabling a larger class to look upon the demonstrations
exhibited in figures and diagrams than could be otherwise be made to
understand the truth or fact sought to be illustrated.
But the fact is equally clear, and to be regretted, that this easy and
ready mode of imparting knowledge, often fails to make any very deep or
lasting impression on the memory of the learner, who feels that he has
been galloped through a multiplicity of studies, deemed necessary in the
course laid down by the school or institution to which he belongs, and
he finally graduated and obtains his diploma--feeling, however, that the
has threaded a labyrinth through which he could not have passed without
the help and side lifts of experienced tutors--who, had they kept him
much longer at this spelling and copy book, would have done him and his
country far more service.
Bad spelling and chicken track chirography, is far from being creditable
to a graduate of a popular college, like Dartmouth or Yale, yet we
sometimes have the mortification to witness such scholastic specimens.
It was not so with those who graduated at our log school houses in the
country. They were generally all good spellers and could write a
legible hand." INCOG