Hillside School, Dist. #100 (aka, The Park Office) -- Part 1

The Hillside School (Park Office) today

After all these years, we may finally be covering the last of the pre-1900 schoolhouses in Mill Creek
Hundred! And unless I'm missing one (please feel free to speak up if I am), it's the last of the one-room schoolhouses built in MCH. From its inception it was always an almost ridiculously small district (but one the residents wanted) that almost immediately lost some of its tax base, and only operated for about 40 years. However, the building did survive and is even back in public use and owned by the state!

The school I'm referring to was known as the Hillside School, and designated as School District #100. The little brick school building sits on the east side of Thompson Station Road across from the eastern end of Chambers Rock Road, in the far western edge of MCH. The brick schoolhouse, since plastered over and with a few additions, now serves as the park office for White Clay Creek State Park (WCCSP). Its beginnings, however, go back more than 130 years.

Even today, if you go driving around on Thompson Station, Chambers Rock, Pleasant Hill, or Hopkins Roads, it can feel very (and in my opinion, wonderfully) empty. Even though you're only a few miles from bustling Newark and Kirkwood Highway, it seems remote. In the late 1800's it felt even more so to the relatively small number of local residents. This is one reason why, by the late 1880's, they were beginning to campaign for a new school for their children. At this point they were still part of District #31, attending the Union School all the way over on Corner Ketch Road. It was almost a mile and a half as the crow flies, but more like two or two and a half if the child walked along the road. 

By March 1891 the new district had been formed and the state legislature was passing a bill to allow them to borrow money for a schoolhouse. In early April, the first district meeting was held "at Thompson", which may have meant the Thompson Station of the Newark & Pomeroy Railroad, or it could have just referred to the area. At the meeting, C.C. Davis, Joel Thompson, and Abel J. Hopkins were elected as the first commissioners, and a school tax was approved. Prominent local landowner David Chambers donated $500 toward the cost of building the schoolhouse, which would end up being about $2000. In July, just over an acre of land on the east side of the public road was purchased from farmer Eli Davis for the school. Oddly, there is also another, almost identical sale the following March. My only guess as to why it was done is that in the first deed, it looks like the buyer is written as "School District No 102", instead of District No 100. Perhaps someone noticed and wanted to make sure everything was correct.

Notice of the first meeting of District #100,
in April 1891

Beginning of the first deed of sale for the school
site, with what looks like District No 102

The school was erected in 1891, and it took a whole year before the first major issue arose. To understand why it was a problem, you have to remember how these rural districts worked. They were funded by the taxpayers within the district. And of course, since the students walked to school and they were one-room schoolhouses, the districts were generally not very large. Small districts means few taxpayers, around which to spread the costs. The Hillside District #100 was already small to begin with (which the residents knew), but it got worse in 1892 when the governments came to move things around -- and by things, I mean state borders.

The entire story is a post for another time, but in 1892, the governments of Delaware and Pennsylvania got together to finally settle the issue of "The Wedge". This was the sliver of land between the circular "12 mile arc" border and the north-south western border of the rest of Delaware. To condense the long story to one sentence, it was never quite clear whether this area was in Delaware or Pennsylvania, so it ended up as almost a no-man's land in neither.

The important point for our story here is that when the relevant lines were re-surveyed in 1892, it was decided that The Wedge was, indeed, part of Delaware, but the 12-mile arc line was moved slightly inwards. (For a very in-depth discussion of the 1892 resurvey, check out the posts a few years ago from guest-poster SteamCarriage about Mitchell Station -- Part 1 and Part 2). As it was, the district only had about 18-20 taxable families within its borders. The resurvey of the state line was going to take about six of those families and move them into Pennsylvania. This would, naturally, increase the tax burden on the remaining families. They were no more thrilled about that than you would be.

It got to the point where Joel Thompson, on whose land the arc stone was placed (marking the intersection of the 12-mile arc and the east-west MD-PA line), refused to allow it to be erected for about a week and a half. He was not personally affected, but strongly objected to his neighbors being forced out of the state. This actually brings up two items about which I am to some degree unsure. The first is a school house that appears on both the 1881 Hopkins map and the 1893 Baist map. It's located on the west side of White Clay Creek and the west side of Creek Road, just a short distance south of Chambers Rock Road. 

Section of the 1881 map with the McClellandville School #40 and the mystery Thompson
schools circled. The square marks where the Hillside School would be built in 1891.

I have not found any information on what this school was. There is no district number shown on the map, and it sits within the McClellandville School's District #40. That school sat on the east side of  New London Road (Rt 896) in what would now be the Carpenter Recreation Area of WCCSP. It's also confusing that this mystery school appears on the 1893 map, but the Hillside School (which would have been up for two years already) does not. However, I have seen other instances of the 1893 map making mistakes that lead me to believe it was in large part copying the 1881 map.

The other item I am unsure of is the exact borders of District #100. While any district formed prior to 1868 will be demarcated on that year's Beers Map, none of the later maps show school district boundaries. The fact that Joel Thompson is a commissioner, and lives in WCCH on the west side of the creek, implies that the district spans the two hundreds as well as the creek. This doesn't seem to be common among school districts, but it does occur a few times, making this plausible. Also, I think that several of those "lost" residents were in WCCH, not MCH.

Despite the protestations of the locals, the state line did move, and the district continued with their diminished tax base. At some point they must have paid off the school building, for which they still owed $800 at the end of 1892. The next incident at the school that I found mention of occurred five years later, in October 1897. This involved the attendance to the school of a nine year old boy named Edgar Davis. Nowhere is it ever written that he was a bad kid, or a troublemaker, or a bad or disruptive student. Edgar Davis' only, and to many, unforgivable sin, was that he was African-American. Some of the parents in the district found it intolerable that their little boy or girl should have to sit in a school room with "a negro". 

October 4, 1897 article detailing the Edgar Davis incident

You might think that at this time, if several of the parents strongly objected to the presence of a Black child, it would be an easy task to have them removed. However, the objectors had two things working against them. The first was that at that time Delaware schools were not (exactly) legally segregated. It seems that African-American children were only required to attend a "colored school" if there was one in their vicinity, otherwise they could attend the nearest school. Several parents consulted with a Wilmington attorney and were informed that this was the case and that they had no legal recourse.

The second factor in young Edgar's favor was why he was there in the first place. Originally from Wilmington, Edgar moved the the area to live with his mother, who was employed and living on the farm of Joel Thompson, seemingly the most prominent man in the area. He and his son Daniel held two of the three school commissioner spots, so they pretty much ran the district. If it was OK with the Thompsons, it was OK. Hillside School's teacher, Miss Blanche Ferguson, tried to make the best of the situation. She did teach the boy, as she was required to do, but did so individually and had him sit by himself. I don't know if this had anything to do with it, but four months later she left the school, accepting a position at the Newark public school. I was not able to find any follow-up reports to figure out how the situation was resolved, but my guess would be that Edgar was removed from the school before long. It would have been his mother's "choice", however, as the law would not have intervened. Even though this was a year after the Plessy v. Ferguson case enshrined the idea of separate but equal, Delaware would not legally segregate its schools for several decades.

After the Edgar Davis affair, the Hillside School carried on in the usual fashion for another 35 years. There were school outings, ice cream socials, and even a dance in April 1920 to benefit "the electric light fund" (presumably to pay for electricity to the school). In October 1916 the school was briefly closed out of the desire "to take every precaution", due to an outbreak of infantile paralysis, or polio (the teacher at that time was Sarah Potts). Families associated with the school over the years included Mitchell, Mousley, Eastburn, Aiken, Hill, Kee, Davis, Lamborn, Harkness, Buckingham, and Strahorn, among many others.

And while the district had always been small, by the early 1930's it became very small. By 1933 it became too small. State law said that a school had to keep an enrollment of at least 12 pupils, and Hillside had only seven. The school (along with the Fairview School) was told it would not reopen for the 1933-34 school year, and that its students would likely attend school in Newark. It should be mentioned that the students were not the only thing to go from Hillside to Newark. When David Chambers gave the money to the district for the schoolhouse, he also gave them $1000 with the instructions to invest it, keep the principal intact, and use the interest to buy something the school needed. When the school closed, the money was transferred to the Newark School District. As of 1962, Newark High School was still giving out the David Chambers Award to a worthy senior. I don't know if it's still around, or when it might have been discontinued.

The Hillside School in 1932, a year before it closed, with some curious students peeking out.

In the next post, we'll see what became of the little, brick schoolhouse, and meet some of the people who called it home after the students were gone. We'll find out why it was thought for a time that it would be lost, and how it came to acquire the role it serves in the community today.