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
daguerrotype 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 successivley 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
--
Adina Watkins Dyer, coordinator
Tippecanoe Co. IN USGenWeb Project
http://www.rootsweb.com/~intippec/index.html
INTIPPEC-L: Discussion list for Tippecanoe Co. IN Genealogy and History,
Listowner
"Yesterday's gone, tomorrow may never come, but we have this moment
today."