Mt. Cuba's Diamond School District #84

Section of an 1860 map showing the Diamond 
School (red circle), and the Mt Pleasant (left blue)
and Walnut Green (right blue) Schools

In the recent post about the District #77 Marshallton School, I mentioned that over the years we had covered "just about every old schoolhouse that does or did once stand in Mill Creek Hundred". In saying that, I did have in mind one school that we hadn't yet featured and about which I've only recently learned. This may well be the last 19th Century MCH school to cover, and although it was open for over 60 years, it has my vote as the most obscure of the old rural schools in the area. In fact, I was a good bit into my investigation of it before I even figured out what its name was.

This old schoolhouse stood on the south side of the bend in Barley Mill Road, between Mt. Cuba Road and the Mt. Cuba Center. As noted it operated as a school for more than 60 years, and stood as a residence for another 60 or 70 after that (I think). The extent of my knowledge of the history of this school has a bit of a gap in it. It basically boils down to -- I know when it started...40 years of almost nothing...a controversy...another decade of nothing...then a 10 year long crusade to close it. Then at the end there's a connection to a business that some of you probably had contact with at some point over the years. But let's start at the beginning...

Since there are rarely newspaper articles about the openings of pre-1900 schools, I've found that the most reliable way to determine the start date for a school is to find the original deed, wherein a landowner sells a parcel of land to a school district. Sometimes it takes a while, having to narrow down a timeframe, often using maps, and then figure out who the property owner would have been at the time. In this case it was a little tricky, because there was a home very close to the schoolhouse location. The 1849 map has a dot for a structure in the right place, but it doesn't label it, so I couldn't tell if the school was there then or not. (Plus, I had confused myself by having an old deed that I thought was this school but was actually for the nearby Mt. Pleasant School on Old Wilmington Road.)