Early School Development in McDonough County

The development of schools in McDonough County is an engaging story—of values, efforts, and improvements that eventually made a great contribution to countless lives. This brief overview will emphasize the kinds of schools that provided general education during several past generations— and in a later article for this series, I will focus on college-level institutions.

Of course, the earliest school buildings were log cabins on the raw frontier.

The first one was located in Industry Township, during 1830, and it was taught by a man named George Dowell.

We have no description of it, but The History of Bardolph, Illinois (1911) describes one of the early log cabin schools in that community, which was surely similar: “This [windowless] cabin contained a huge fireplace, and when the enormous back-log was rolled into place and the fire was started for the day, the scholars’ faces would burn, while their feet would freeze. . . .

There were slab seats for the scholars, and a three-legged stool, and a hickory rod, for the teacher. . . . The desks were large planks held in place by pegs in the logs.”

Fortunately, in a 1914 Macomb Journal article titled “The Schools of Yesterday,” an elderly woman named Belle Griffith recalled attending Timber School, in a better log cabin building, at the Spring Creek neighborhood southwest of Macomb, before the Civil War: “It was built of logs, and was about twenty feet square, with a puncheon floor and slab benches for seats, ten to fifteen feet long. . . . When I was a girl, we sat ten in a seat, with our slates and books in our laps. There were two windows on each side of the room, except in the front where the door stood wide open, except only in the severest weather.

Hung on the back wall was a wide board that served as a desk for all our books . . . and was also where we learned to write—when the ink wasn’t frozen. A great Franklin stove stood in the middle of the room.”

Mrs. Griffith, who was later among the first generation of female teachers in the county, also depicts the typical, rural, one-room schoolteacher of her childhood era (the 1850s): “He was always a man.

I never went to a woman teacher until I was fourteen years old. The scarcity of men on account of the [Civil] war finally gave women their chance, and they have had it ever since.

. . . Our teacher never sat down, but walked the floor carrying a long hickory switch as a reminder of our duty to our books. We had a set of rules read to us every morning, such as ‘no fighting,’ ‘no swearing,’ ‘courtesy to elders we met,’ etc. Woe unto us for disobedience to those rules. That hickory came down with a vengeance.”

As her comments reveal, the early male teachers were often strict—and abusive— but they sometimes had to cope with boys who were troublesome. For example, Benjamin Patch, who taught at the log-cabin Gin Ridge School in the winter of 1850-1851, recalled being told by the school directors, when he was hired, that “a lot of big tough boys who attended school often made much trouble,” and that had caused some teachers to quit. But Patch himself did okay.

The often little-educated teachers commonly taught reading, writing, math, and maybe some fundamentals of geography and history.

And that continued, as frame school buildings replaced log ones, and many rural neighborhoods established schools. Indeed, by roughly the turn of the century McDonough County had 137 country schools, and they sometimes had names that reflected the natural world in our rural areas, such as Eagle School, Frog Pond School, Hickory Grove School, Muddy Lane School, Possum Hollow School, Prairie School, Rabbit Burrow School, and Rock Creek School.

Also, the early schools, in the towns or the countryside, were “subscription” ones, paid for by the families who sent children to attend them. The school terms were often short as well. Six months was common, but some early ones functioned only in the winter, for a few months. As that suggests, too, children often had work to do at home in the warmer weather. In Macomb, the earliest tax-supported schools were four frame buildings that opened in 1857 and 1858.

Of course, there were efforts to develop schools with greater educational purpose as well. For example, in 1847 James M.

Campbell (who came from Kentucky in 1831 and was the most important leader in early Macomb) built a frame schoolhouse on Jackson Street, a half mile west of the square, and that subscription school was also used for high school-level classes— devoted to geography, history, and even Latin and Greek languages—according to a local newspaper ad titled “High School” that appeared in 1852. However, that institution didn’t last very long.

And in 1851 the Macomb Female Seminary was organized by several area leaders. (A photograph of it appears here.) As I mention in my Macomb: A Pictorial History (1990), “The directors erected a frame building . . . on the west side of what is now Chandler Park, and they offered winter and summer sessions. The first session began in January, 1852, when forty young women and girls were taught by a Miss Lane.”

The school’s purpose was to provide both primary and secondary education for women, so the curriculum included English, mathematics, the classics, music, and even drawing.

It operated until public schools were established in 1857. Then it closed. But the Macomb Female Seminary venture also reveals that some early residents were already concerned about the need for providing educational opportunity for women.

So, in a sense, there were secondary schools, of a subscription type, trying to operate at the county seat before the Civil War. But Macomb’s first public high school was established in 1865, in a new, elegant, two-story brick building on Calhoun Street—where the YMCA is now located. It had six rooms, plus fenced-in school grounds, as the photograph here reveals. And the building also housed primary and intermediate classes as well as high school ones.

In that opening year, the high school classes were taught entirely by J. J. Smith, the county’s superintendent of schools. He also introduced the graded educational system at Macomb, which then was a community of 2,700 residents.

The first Macomb High School class graduated from that institution in 1868— and strangely, it was composed of five females. So, local women were beginning to want better education for various reasons, including preparation for the expanding opportunities to teach.

Fortunately, the Macomb schools were integrated in 1872, and at the end of that decade, in 1879, the first Black student graduated from the high school: Moses Fields. What that also suggests is the positive impact of our schools on American values and the sense of community.

And social ideals were increasingly associated with the educational system, too. As an article in the Macomb Journal asserted in 1882, “the public schools . . . occupy four large, well-arranged buildings,” and “They are admirably graded, well systematized, thoroughly taught, and humanely governed.” As a result, “The morality and intelligence of the masses are very high,” and “the society of Macomb is far above that of the average western [i.e., midwestern] city.”

There were also significant school developments in other McDonough County towns. In Bushnell, for example, a two-story, eightroom, brick school building was constructed during 1875-1876, and that school not only had graded elementary classes but a two-year high school course as well.

That was extended to three years during the 1880s and, finally, to four years in 1901.

Unfortunately, the original building burned down in 1896, but it was immediately replaced by another sizable, elegant brick structure (West Side School), complete with bookcases, blackboards, a water fountain, and an assembly room. (Strangely, the Macomb High School had also burned down, in 1886, and it had been rapidly replaced by a more modern building, too.)

There was very interesting school development in Prairie City as well. An academy was established there in the late 1850s, and fortunately, in 1861 the directors hired Daniel Branch, a college-educated school administrator from New England who had been a principal in New York and Ohio. He was married to a talented educator named Sarah Waldo, and initially they took charge of schools in several communities, beyond Illinois. In the 1860s she helped him operate the Prairie City Academy—which eventually closed after the Civil War.

That building then became the local high school.

In 1865, Branch was hired as the county’s superintendent of schools, and so, the talented couple then moved to Macomb. He was outstanding in that role, upgrading the county’s schools, until they left for Kansas in 1878. He was later the Iowa City Superintendent of Schools, too.

As his local work also suggests, McDonough County has had many committed teachers and educational leaders who have had a great impact over the generations.

At the time of the founding of Colchester, 18561857, a school was erected. As June Moon says in her history, Multum in Parvo, “It was a crude affair, 20 by 30 feet in size . . . built of planks barn fashion and had a shingle roof.” That structure served the community until, during the years 1866-1867, the new brick school pictured here was constructed at the site of the earlier one at a cost of nearly $8,000.

Another noted educational institution is the St Paul School in Macomb, which was constructed in 1902. It was operated by the Sisters of St. Francis, from Clinton, Iowa—the same Catholic group that also ran Macomb’s St. Francis Hospital— until the 1950s.

And no public school of the past had a greater impact than the Macomb High School on South Johnson Street, which opened in 1915. Many older people now can still recall attending that school, before it closed in 1969. Indeed, I did my WIU student teaching there in 1967, and I can recall such well-known teachers as Robert Alexander (math), Lorraine Epperson (business), Louise Simshauser (world history), Miriam Riggins (American history), and Margaret Neff (English).

As all of this suggests, the public education heritage in McDonough County is very complex, involving more than 150 schools—including high schools in eight towns over the generations. And the purpose and quality of those schools had a huge positive impact on the culture of our county.