The Eden School

Eden School marker stone

We've covered quite a few, if not most, of the old, 19th Century schools of Mill Creek Hundred. These schools sat one to a district, and the districts (as they were in 1868) can be seen in the colorful map in the upper right-hand side of the page. The first of these districts were created as a result of the Free School Act of 1829, which was the first real attempt to make education available for Delaware children. The districts were each designed to hold about 35 students, with a small schoolhouse in which they would receive their rudimentary education. The funding to build the school and pay the teacher (from what I can tell there usually was only one per school) was derived from a school tax paid by the residents of said district.

However, as you can imagine, education in Delaware and in Mill Creek Hundred specifically did not begin in 1829. Although fewer in number than in later years, there were schools prior to the Free School Act. An earlier attempt at school funding created a fund for schools for poor children, with the money coming from marriage and tavern taxes. (Maybe because marriage and drinking are the two most common causes of children??) However, this was A) underfunded, and B) parents were reluctant to send their children there, in the process admitting they were indigent. If there was such a school in MCH, I am unaware of it.

Another, more common type of school was the subscription school. It was sort of like a local private school, with families paying a monthly tuition to the teacher. In reality, I don't think it was much of a transition into the public school system, with the school tax being just a mandatory "tuition", and the school board commissioners acting as middlemen. (And it should be noted that all these were, of course, only for white children.) The only such subscription school I had been aware of was the one founded in 1808 near Old St. James Church, west of Stanton. However, the story of another old school was recently brought to my attention.

Myrtle Emma -- Christmas Stories

Six of the Morris kids, c.1930

Just in time for the Holidays, I have a few Christmas-themed excerpts from our memoirist, Myrtle Emma White. Christmas was certainly a big deal then (1920's/1930's), but definitely not the all-out commercial extravaganza that it is now. And for a rural family with eight kids and limited resources, Christmas was less about getting lots of stuff and more about family, making things as special as you could, and enjoying what you did have. As a parent myself, I feel confident in saying that Frank and Elizabeth Morris did everything they could to make it as special as possible for their children, while secretly wishing they could do more. I also feel confident in saying that their children were raised well enough to appreciate what they had and not to be upset that they didn't have more. It probably helped that likely none of their friends or schoolmates had much more than they did. Again, the experiences of the Morris family are noteworthy not because they are unique, but because they aren't. Their story is the story of countless other rural families of the time.

The first of Myrtle's stories is about Christmas breakfast. It's a short segment, but in it you can really feel how much the family looked forward to this time together. The second passage is actually an excerpt from a larger chapter entitled The Seasons. We'll see the rest of it another time, but here I've included Myrtle's remembrances of the Fall/Winter holidays -- Halloween, Thanksgiving, and of course, Christmas. I find interesting Myrtle's takes on the first two, and how different they are from ours now. For her, Halloween was far from being the fun/candy/dress-up time that my own four year old looked forward to for months this year. Instead, she was so scared that she hid away, not participating at all. And Thanksgiving was "just a day home from school". They had a nice meal, but it was not the big, get-together-with-family holiday we know. I feel like that may not have fully formed until after WWII, when car travel was more universal and more easy. (Granted it was a few decades earlier, but in a previous post we saw that John W. Banks threw a party on Thanksgiving night in 1884, never even mentioning that it was Thanksgiving.)

Myrtle's recollections of childhood Christmases tell of joyous, though not extravagant, affairs. I don't know how many of today's kids would find it sufficient, but it sounds pretty good to me.

White Clay Creek School -- District No. 36

Postcard showing the White Clay Creek School

In the past we've taken a look -- sometimes in-depth, sometimes in a more cursory manor -- at most of the 19th Century schools that educated the children of the farmers, laborers, and artisans of Mill Creek Hundred. There has been one that I've skipped over so far, partially because I didn't much information about it, but mostly because I had never seen a photograph of it. One of the real joys about continuing to write the blog (when I thought I would run out of topics years ago) is that you never know when something wonderful will come out of the blue.

A few weeks back, Mary Torbey showed me a postcard she had recently purchased, which was labeled as "White Clay Creek School Building". I had never seen this particular one before, but I was pretty sure I knew what it had to be. The White Clay Creek School, District No. 36, stood for many years along the Capital Trail, the Road from Stanton to Newark, the Road to White Clay Church, or any of the many other things this stretch of road has been known as over the years. Although I knew where it had been, I did not know when it was built, when it closed, or when it was torn down. I figured I might be able to find out some more about it, but the first order of business was to verify that the schoolhouse on the postcard truly was the District No. 36 school.

As stated, the school stood on the north side of the main road to Newark, just east of Polly Drummond Hill Road and White Clay Creek Presbyterian Church. It is clearly seen on the 1849 map below. The trick to the current location, though, is that this stretch of the old road dipped south of the current path of Kirkwood Highway (as highlighted in yellow below). Therefore, the school sat south of Kirkwood Highway, as it so happens, on the property of a current school -- Shue-Medill Middle School. Its location is circled in red in the bottom photo below.