Adams County’s Historic Schools, Part 1

The earliest settlers of
Adams County valued education. In most townships, as soon as there were a few
children on the farms or new towns in an area, the people built a log school, appointed
a school board, and hired a teacher. As populations grew, more schools were added.

In Camp Point Township,
for example, the first school was built in 1836 in Section 26, the second in
1840 in Section 29, and the third in 1840 in Section 12. In 1853 as the town of
Camp Point grew, a school was built that was described in the History of Adams
County as “probably the best finished and most comfortably arranged
school-house in the county.” Another school was added within three years, and
then the forward-thinking citizens built a 66’ x 80’, three-story brick school
and named it Maplewood, completed in 1867. By 1879, the average attendance was
about 500.

Even before Quincy was
founded in 1825, some students attended subscription schools in which a local
or traveling teacher offered a curriculum for a certain time, usually between
fall harvest and spring planting, for a set price. The first public school in
Quincy was held in 1837 in the First Congregational Church’s meeting house, a
log building known as “the Lord’s Barn” near Fourth and Jersey Streets, facing Washington
Square. According to the 1879 History of Adams County, Illinois, that school
had about 30 students.

Regarding education in
Quincy, the History of Adams County states, “It had been necessary, meantime,
to rent rooms in various places for the accommodation of the scholars, who had
been growing in numbers by the increase of population, and in 1843 the first
school-house was built by the town authorities. This was a two-story brick
building on the Franklin school lot, on Fifth street….Its dimensions were about
40×60 feet, and it contained two rooms….A little over a year afterward a
similar building was put up on Jefferson square, and this remained occupied for
school purposes until the county purchased the ground and commenced to build a
new court-house thereon.”

Rural schools were
centrally located for students. They typically had first through eighth grades
in one room. The children often walked across countryside and through woods and
crossed creeks to get to school.

The male and female teachers
of the one-room schools in the county were sometimes married citizens of the
community but were more often young and single and boarded with local families.

In one instance, boarding
turned to tragedy. The infamous Pfanschmidt murders occurred during the night
of September 28, 1912, when all occupants of a farmhouse north of Payson were bludgeoned
to death. One of the fatalities was Emma Kaempen, the local teacher who was
boarding with the family.

For teachers in rural
schools, the risk of murder was small, but they did face other lesser dangers.
When Mrs. Lorton was the teacher at Benville, over the county line in Brown
County’s Buckhorn Township where part of Siloam was located, a sixth grade boy
was required to stay after school. He escaped the building, waited outside, and
when the teacher followed him, pelted her with clods and rocks with such
excellent aim that she retreated into the schoolhouse until it was nearly dark
and the village blacksmith arrived and rescued her. She reported in the History
of Brown County that she “had no further trouble with the boy for his parents
took care of him.”

In Siloam, McKee
Township, schooling was complicated as the county line between Adams and Brown
Counties bisected the community. The Forest Hotel was in Brown County and the
post office, within sight to the south, was in Adams. Some of the local
children attended Benville, Ferguson, Little Missouri, or Reddick Schools in
Buckhorn Township of Brown County and some attended Washington Grove, Spring
Valley, and Happy Hollow School District No. 8, in McKee Township of Adams
County.

As communities grew, a
few larger ones added high schools, and students from outlying small rural
schools often boarded in the larger town to attend school. By 1879, one-fifth
of the students attending Maplewood School in Camp Point were from other parts
of the county who came to take high school level courses. Payson became a
leader in education in Adams County with day schools and boarding schools
attended by the children of some of the most prominent families in Quincy.

Careful records were not
always kept. The Adams County Illinois Historical Schools web site lists 137
public schools that once existed in the county and are no longer open, but even
that lengthy list is incomplete. The Happy Hollow School near Siloam was not
included in the web site list. It is probable that other Adams County
communities since disappeared, such as Morley’s Settlement north of Lima, and
Montgomery and Chestline, southeast and north of Liberty, respectively, had
schools. Other towns like Kingston that have diminished greatly in size since their
heydays, also once had their own schools, but are not on the list. The Lone Oak
School has one source locating it in Beverly while another source placed it in Richfield.
Schools that met in homes may never have had a name. It is likely that Adams County
once had about 150 schools that no longer exist.

The Adams County Illinois
Historical Schools web site lists these locations and numbers of schools that
are no longer in operation: Augusta: three, Bowen: five, Camp Point: twelve,
Clayton: five, Coatsburg: nine, Columbus: ten, Fishhook: four, Kellerville:
six, Liberty: nine, and Lima: three. A large rural area north of Quincy and
west of Mendon that was designated as Long Island had seven, Loraine: five, Marblehead:
eight, Mendon: eight, and Payson: twelve. The area between the city of Quincy
and Baldwin Field was designated Quincy East and had eleven schools that are no
longer there. The area south of Quincy and west of Route 57 north of Marblehead
was designated as Quincy West and had two. Richfield had ten, and Tioga had seven
schools.

SOURCES

Adams
County IL Historical Schools. IL HomeTownLocator.

History of Adams County, Illinois…, (1879). Murray,
Williamson & Phelps. Chicago.

History
of Brown County, Illinois 1880-1970. Brown County Board of the Schuyler Brown
Historical and Genealogical Society. Astoria, IL: Stevens Publishing.

Lane, Beth. Lies Told Under Oath (2012). Bloomington,
IN: iUniverse.

Lone
Oak School (historical), Township of Beverly, Adams County, Illinois, United
States.

School
Histories. Adams County Illinois Genealogy and History.