Ross Township School Report Card, 1875 (cont'd)

Having covered Alfred Winslow and the Brown's Point school last time, I shall now look at the other Ross Township schools described by the county superintendent of schools in 1875.



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Crown Point Register, 11 Feb. 1875.

The superintendent was not impressed by District No. 13. The school building was sparsely equipped, and the pupils and their parents seemed unenthusiastic. Based on the fact that the teacher here was Mary Underwood, I'm guessing that this was the one-room Underwood school. Mary was probably the 19-year-old daughter of Daniel and Sybil Underwood. (Three years after this report, she would marry Jackson Castle.)

District No. 1 was being taught by Asa Bullock. He was about 20 years old, the son of Moses and Amanda Bullock, and in 1875 probably still living where he was recorded in the 1870 Census, on the Bullock farm along 73rd Avenue. If he taught at the nearest school to his home, that would be the one-room Adams school on the northeast corner of Colorado and 69th. In spite of poor equipment, the superintendent says, "The teacher is quite thorough and is doing good work." As we learned from his obituary, Asa had formal training at a normal school and taught for some eleven years, before going into the practice of law. At his death, some of his former pupils still remembered him as "a good teacher."

Next we have District No. 2, which was especially bad. The (few) students' textbooks were "wholly unfit" while their seats were "a complete wreck, all broken and cut up." The teacher was Cyrus Smith, and since his farm, as we know, lay just west of the intersection of (present-day) Green and 73rd, I'm guessing he taught at the Ainsworth school, which in 1875 still had only one room. Cyrus' 1915 obituary said, "In his earlier days in Ross township, he taught school for eight years during the winter months." (During the other months, of course, he farmed.) The superintendent says nothing about how well the students were doing. Unless I'm reading too much into that silence, that suggests they weren't doing particularly well. Perhaps Cyrus — while evidently competent, since he kept getting re-hired — was not the sort of extraordinarily gifted enough teacher who could inspire the undersupplied students in their dilapidated school.

Moving on, we find that the "Merrillville Graded School" was large enough to need two teachers. Again, no maps or charts, but otherwise the report was favorable: "Order good; pupils pretty well advanced; good interest, and good attendance. Teacher quite thorough and doing good work." The teacher in this case, I believe, was Orsemus H. Spencer, whom we've met before only in passing (as the brother-in-law of Harriet Hanks Chester, and the brother of Charles Spencer). Mrs. Spencer, whose department the superintendent did not have time to examine, was the former Emma Gearhart, whom Orsemus married in 1871 (Indiana Marriage Collection). She was his third wife.

His first wife was Esther A. Tree, a native of Canada, who shows up in the 1850 Census in Porter County. Her father's name is illegible, but elsewhere[1] is given as Bradford; her mother's name is Lucinda; and Esther has a sister, Marilla, who eventually married Charles Spencer — so two sisters married two brothers. As for the Spencer family, originally from Ohio where Orsemus had been born in 1836, by 1850 they had settled in Hobart. As early as 1855 Orsemus began appearing in the Hobart Township Trustee's ledger as a teacher.

In 1856 Orsemus and Esther eloped (I'm guessing) to marry in Berrien County, Michigan. The 1860 Census shows the young couple, with their two small boys, farming in Porter County. In August 1862, Orsemus joined the 73rd Regiment, Indiana Infantry. Apparently he was taken as a prisoner of war, then paroled, and discharged from the Army in July 1863 for health reasons, suffering from "heart disease and rheumatism from exposure while in prison."[2]

Probably in April 1866, Esther died.[3] On May 20, 1867, Orsemus married Lucy Hanks. He and Lucy, with the sons from his first marriage, were recorded in Hobart in the 1870 Census, he giving his occupation as schoolteacher. Lucy died sometime in 1870 or 1871, though I can't determine exactly when.[4]

On August 18, 1871, Orsemus married Emma Gearhart. As late as June 1879 I find both of them in the Hobart Township Trustee's records, receiving pay as teachers. Perhaps it was that summer that they left for Kansas, where the 1880 Census found them, and where they lived out the rest of their lives. Orsemus died there in 1896. When Emma died in 1907, her body was brought back to Indiana for burial.

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This 1875 report does not cover all the schools in Ross Township. I would have liked to hear about the Green, Deep River, Hurlburt, and Vincent schools, all of which show up on the 1874 Plat Map in eastern Ross Township, as well as several others in the more westerly part of the township.

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[1] In the 1900 death certificate of Esther's sister, Marilla Tree Spencer.
[2] Ancestry.com. Kansas, U.S., Enrollment of Civil War Veterans, 1889 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013. Original data: Enrollment of Ex-Soldiers and Sailors, their Widows and Orphans, 1889. Unit ID #190462, 69 volumes. Records of the Adjutant General’s Office. Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas.
[3] Per a family tree on Ancestry.com that does not cite a source for this information.
[4] I find information in the Crown Point Register, in the "From Hobart" columns of June 9, 1870, and June 23, 1870, about the illness and death of Mrs. O.A. Spencer, but if that is a misprint for O.H., then how could Lucy be recorded in the census on July 19, 1870? The same family tree mentioned in footnote 3 above gives June 3, 1870, as the date of Lucy's death but does not cite a source, and again, what about the census?

Alfred Winslow, International Man of Mystery

I came across this story while researching the Underwoods: in the winter of 1875, the Lake County school superintendent[1] went around visiting schools, and much of what he saw, he didn't like, especially in Ross Township. The physical facilities were deficient — maps and charts lacking, blackboards poor, and the pupils' seats ranging from "not very good" to "dilapidated" to "a complete wreck."


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Crown Point Register, 11 Feb. 1875.

Unfortunately, I don't know which school the district numbers refer to, although I can make a guess based on who the teacher was.

The first teacher mentioned is Alfred A. Winslow. I don't remember ever encountering that name before. And yet, when I go searching for the family in the records, I find them here in Ross Township in the 1860 Census through the 1880 Census. But their farm lay on the western border of Ross Township …


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From the 1874 Plat Map. The circle marks the nearest schoolhouse.

… so if I'd wanted to learn about the Winslows, I should have been reading Crown Point rather than Hobart newspapers.

And — what do you know — when I look for "Winslow" in the on-line Crown Point newspapers, one of the first things to come up is this interesting tidbit from the Crown Point Register of March 8, 1888:


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It looks as if the whole family is fighting over their parents' estate, which was considerable. What I want to know is why our Alfred A. Winslow is among the plaintiffs while Mrs. Alfred Winslow (to whom he was still married) is among the defendants!

But let me back up a little and look at the family. The earliest local record I find of Alfred's father, William Augustus Winslow, is his 1853 marriage to Mary Cleveland in Lake County, Indiana. She was his second wife, but what became of the first[2] I do not know; presumably she died, and he was left with two small children (Henry and Lois). In 1854 Mary Cleveland Winslow brought our Alfred into the world. The 1860 Census finds the family farming in western Ross Township (to judge by their neighbors). By then another three children (Edgar, Helen, and John) had joined them, although, oddly enough, the daughter from the first marriage, Lois, was not in the household. At some point after 1860, William and Mary lost their little John, it seems. The 1870 Census shows the addition of three more children: George, Josephine, and Mary, who was also known as Minnie per the 1880 Census. Around 1873, they had a little girl, Flora Bell, who died at two years of age.

In December 1886, William Winslow died.


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Crown Point Register, 16 Dec. 1886.

About ten months later, his widow followed him.


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Crown Point Register, 6 Oct. 1887.

And the next spring, as we've seen, the children fought it out over the estate. In 1890, the old farm passed out of Winslow hands.


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Crown Point Register, 5 Dec. 1890.

At 52 acres, it was half the size it had been in 1874.

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Getting back to Alfred — I believe the school where he taught per the 1875 county superintendent's report was identified by Lenore Boyd Calpha as the one-room Brown's Point school. I believe that simply because it was the school closest school to Alfred's home (see the circle marking it on the 1874 map above).

The fact that the superintendent gave a good account of the teacher and students in spite of the school's lack of equipment and the poor physical condition hints that Alfred was a man of some ability. His subsequent career bore that out; witness this description from 1910:

Alfred A. Winslow … studied law for some time and taught school for ten years,[3] but gave up the profession of teaching for that of journalism, founding in 1881 the "Hammond Tribune," which he published for fifteen years. He assisted in organizing the meat-inspection forces of the Government at Chicago, Illinois, and Hammond, Indiana, having received an appointment as assistant inspector in the bureau of Animal Industry. Mr. Winslow was also for a short time city treasurer of Hammond, Indiana, and assisted in taking the Government Census of 1890. In 1989 he accepted the consulship at Liege, Belgium, from which post he was promoted in 1902 as Consul-General to Guatemala, and in 1906 was transferred to Valparaiso [Chile] as Consul.[4]

From the same source comes this photo of Alfred:


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After retiring from the international scene, Alfred moved back to Crown Point. His death in 1929 was splashed across the front page of the Crown Point Register and was mentioned in newspapers from Connecticut to California.


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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 17 Aug. 1929.

He is buried in Maplewood Cemetery in Crown Point, beside his wife, who died in 1947.

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As so often happens when I start on a story with more than one name in it, I originally meant to focus on the Ross Township schools and what the county superintendent thought of them, but then I went off on the Winslow tangent and spent so much time there that I will have to save for another time my discussion of how awful the rest of the schools were in 1875.

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[1] I think the superintendent at that time was Thaddeus S. Fancher, a Crown Point attorney. See Timothy Horton Ball, Encyclopedia of Genealogy and Biography of Lake County, Indiana, with a Compendium of History 1834 – 1904 (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1904), p. 363.
[2] Susan Decker, whom William married in 1844 in Ashtabula County, Ohio.
[3] I find some evidence in local papers that he left Ross Township and began teaching in Hammond schools soon after 1875.
[4] International Bureau of the American Republics, Bulletin of the International Bureau of the American Republics, Vol. XXX, Nos. 1-3, Jan.-Mar. 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910).)

The Underwood and Other Schools

Some time back, I came across a reference to the Underwood school and had no idea where that school was.

Fortunately, Lenore Boyd Calpha prepared a little map showing the location of Ross Township schools, which has been preserved by the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society and is on display at their museum. Unfortunately, the markers on the map are so tiny that I couldn't read some of them behind the glass of the map's frame. Fortunately, one a recent visit to the museum I came across the map out of its frame and was able to scan it at a high enough resolution that I could blow it up on my computer screen and finally read most of the markers.

So here it is.


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Image courtesy of the Merrillville-Ross Township Historical Society.

And there it is: #13, the Underwood school, on the northwest corner of the intersection of Mississippi Street and U.S. 30. Per the legend on the right, it was among Ross Township's one-room schoolhouses.

I am not 100% sure about the exact location, as the map is a little quirky: notice #17, the W.G. Hahn school — it's marked on the wrong side of S.R. 51. The Adams school, #7, is shown north of the Grand Trunk Railroad tracks where they cross Colorado Street, while the 1908 Plat Map shows the schoolhouse south of the tracks. The Underwood school is not marked on the 1908 Plat Map, nor is it clearly marked on the 1874 Plat Map, although the latter does seem to have the usual symbol for a schoolhouse (a solid square surrounded by a square outline, with or without "S.H.") in the same location as the Calpha map. At any rate, I think we can rely on the Calpha map for approximate locations.

By the way, the map is not dated, so we don't know what "Present" means in its title. But it refers to the museum building as the Merrillville Town Hall, so the map must have been made after 1971, and before Lenore Boyd Calpha's death in 1995.