Back in '02, When the Vincent School Burned

Here's an interesting little event that I didn't know enough to pay attention to the first time I was reading through the 1902 microfilm.


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Hobart Gazette 28 Feb. 1902.

So when Gust Lindborg "bought the old Sullivan schoolhouse" in 1912 — assuming "Sullivan" and "Vincent" are two names for the same school — it wasn't really all that old, was it? — nine or ten years.

The property records for the former Vincent schoolhouse still standing at Clay St. and Harms Rd. give a construction date of 1925. If that's correct (and assuming Sullivan = Vincent), why was the Vincent school building available for purchase in 1912? Were they building a new wooden one then? This is getting complicated.

I wish the story had identified "Miss Burge" better. In the 1900 Census, (Winfield) Scott and Mary Burge had six daughters and two sons living at home. I suppose either of the two eldest daughters, May (born circa 1881) and Bertha (born circa 1882), could have become a teacher by 1902, and maybe even the next eldest, Libbie (born ca. 1885). The census shows the Burges owning their own farm; my guess at its location is marked on this image from the 1908 Plat Map, which also shows how conveniently close for the burned-out students the Goodrich house was.


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The yellow X marks the present location of the brick house that used to be the Vincent schoolhouse. This map places the 1908 schoolhouse* on the north side of present-day E. 83rd Ave.

The Goodriches were Charles and Caroline. They had five children of their own who likely attended the Vincent school: Cora, Ida, Arthur, Clarence, and Harold. (The two youngest would later go to war, and Harold would not come home.)

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*Which would be the one that ended up as the Lindborg home on Ainsworth Road, as I currently understand it all.

Students at the Vincent School

I have mentioned that in the spring of 1918 Evie Thompson's family moved to the vicinity of the Vincent school, and Evie became a student there. We have a photo of her with her classmates.


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Images courtesy of Eldon Harms.

On the back, someone has hinted at the identities of the children …



… failing to include a full surname, or to indicate which name belongs with which child. The only one we can recognize is Eva Thompson herself, the tall girl with glasses, second from the left in the back row.

Looking through the 1920 Census, I have come up with possible surnames for these children, based on the matching first letter and the apparent proximity of their families to the Vincent school:

Elmer Reithel, Harry Sullivan, Clarence Reithel, Theodore Henning, Delmer Henning, Donald Weiler, Eva Thompson, Mathilde Prochno, and Mabel Burkley

These are only guesses on my part, and I still don't know which name goes with which child.

The former Vincent schoolhouse still stands on the southwest corner of the intersection of Clay St. and 83rd Ave., and you can still see that pattern in the brick on its side wall.

Incidentally, I suspect that when the Gazette, in June 1912, mentioned that Gust Lindborg had "bought the old Sullivan schoolhouse" and moved it to Ainsworth to serve as his residence, the building referred to was the old frame Vincent schoolhouse. At that writing, per the 1891 Plat Book, the Sullivans had owned for some twenty years what was originally the Vincent land (per the 1874 Plat Map), and the schoolhouse had always been catercorner to that land, so I can understand why either name might be applied to the schoolhouse.

Also, this obituary of Mercy Vincent suggests that the Vincents had owned the land from circa 1844 until circa 1890, which really has nothing to do with anything, but I didn't post this before so I might as well do it now.


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Hobart Gazette 12 Jan. 1906.