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.


(Click on image to enlarge)
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.