Jane's Education: School in 1820s Fort Wayne
The First Schools in Early Fort Wayne - Part 1 in a series on my ancestors' schooling
The good news is that Jane Suttenfield wasn’t expected to learn more than the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. At school, religious instruction was also a given. So was prompt obedience. More good news: Mission accomplished.
Jane was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1817, one year after her father William found a replacement for himself and got out of the army. He built the first log cabin outside of the fort as a squatter, and made a living, at first, as a sutler - a person who sold provisions to soldiers. He carried mail to places like Piqua, Ohio and the little village of Chicago, usually traveling on foot. He also picked up and delivered annuity money to the Indian agent. He built up his cabin to a two-story structure, the second floor being a “ballroom,” and opened a tavern.
William and his wife Laura wouldn’t have liked the way they were described by those passing through Fort Wayne in days when Jane was a little girl. Major Benjamin Stickney, an Indian agent until 1819, described the place as “a resort for discharged soldiers and other refuse of the human race.” Others said the same thing. It was a motley crowd of Indians, French fur traders, “half-breeds,” in the language of the times, and a few largely unsavory whites. “A mixed and apparently very worthless population,” wrote Major Steven H. Long, a topographical engineer who visited in 1823.
There was no school until Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy and his wife Christiana, known as Kittie, arrived in May 1820. Moving to Fort Wayne was quite a feat. McCoy, his wife and seven children traveled on horseback from Terre Haute with a hired man, an Indian assistant, a teacher named Mr. Lykins and six Indian foster children. They drove a herd of 15 cattle and 43 pigs all the way. Their possessions were poled up the Wabash River on flatboats, and portaged across to the St. Mary’s River. The McCoys set up housekeeping inside the Fort, and Fort Wayne residents helped them plow two acres for a garden.
McCoy intended to serve as missionary to the Myaamia (Miami) and Potawatomie Indians. But when their school opened on May 29th it had “ten English scholars, six French, eight Indians and one negro.” He turned no one down, and by the end of the year had some 44 students. Jane was too young, but maybe her sister Sophia was one of the ten “English” children. The school was taught by the Lancastrian System, also known as the Monitorial Method.
The Lancastrian System
Joseph Lancaster was an Englishman who opened a school to teach the poor. As more students eagerly arrived wanting to learn to read, he developed a system of having more proficient students teaching others, since he could not afford to hire another teacher. It provided a rudimentary universal education for the poor when the poor had no other options. At least they could be educated to the point of knowing how to read and write, and know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and compute fractions.
The system became widely used in the early nineteenth century as it was inexpensive, efficient, and met the needs of colonial expansionism. It came to be used in 21 countries. It allowed for large class sizes - over 100 - with only one teacher, with student monitors giving the actual instruction. The children who were quicker to master a lesson would be appointed as monitors to teach the lesson to others at “stations.” Instead of having a textbook for each student, the pages of a textbook were enlarged and mounted on posters hung from the walls. Now, only one textbook was needed for the entire school - even if it was 500 kids. Monitors took groups of ten kids to a series of stations with these textbook lessons, and all read them together. They might move on to the next station, or return to their seats to do a practice based on that lesson.
Much of Lancaster’s system sounds very familiar still. Students were expected to work in absolute silence. Lancaster wrote, “Talking should be considered a great offense; and with due care, it occurs very seldom.” (This is not true in public schools now but was in my childhood.) Monitors gave out tickets for good behavior and correct answers and tickets could be traded in for small prizes - much as the “prize box” still in such common use in schools today.
Lancaster did not believe in corporal punishment. But he did believe in punishment, and used methods of humiliation, such as making students wear a sign printed with their offense, or a four- to six-pound log around their neck. He even suggested placing students in a sturdy basket or sack and suspending them from the ceiling of the classroom - the most dreaded punishment. Students were trained to instantly obey very precise commands in unison, and to walk in lockstep. He even had precise ways to remove and put on one's hat, or to take out and put away one's slate. These were models of efficiency and did save much time for learning.
Fort Wayne’s Earliest Schools
McCoy probably implemented the Lancastrian System because at the time it was considered the best method for the population he was serving. It’s unlikely he had a class set of textbooks or the money for them. Plus, he was so often gone, traveling seeking funds to support the mission. But his time in Fort Wayne was brief. In 1822, he received permission to move his mission to Michigan. He was discouraged by the alcohol problems so prevalent among the Indians and the inability to keep unscrupulous whites from taking advantage of them. McCoy believed that in a more isolated setting there would be more control over the problem. In his two years, five teachers had come and gone, finding frontier life and teaching at the school much more challenging than anticipated.
A couple who worked as assistants to him stayed on at the school in the fort. They were followed by a series of teachers who stayed for one season. This was typical for decades. For most, teaching was something to do for a year or two, until something better came along.
In 1825, residents took advantage of a clause in the 1816 state constitution that allowed county seminaries to be supported by fines paid for criminal offenses and fees for military exemptions. (A seminary was another word for ‘academy’ and did not have the theological meaning it does today.) The county built a small brick seminary. But the community quickly found, as other counties did, that the fines and fees were not enough to sustain a school. Teachers used the building but taught on a subscription basis. Parents paid for what they wanted their children to be taught, and also paid a fee for the wood used to heat the room. Jane attended school here.
Most people received what we would consider about a third- or fourth-grade education today. Jane wasn’t an upper-class girl who might have been sent to a finishing school with lessons in dance, water color, “fancywork,” piano and French.
It would be decades before Fort Wayne had free public schools (or more accurately, taxpayer-supported); 1865 in fact. They would be too late for Jane’s children, and she and her husband Myron paid for their children’s private schools. Unlike the education she and Myron received, they were able to send their children to school well into their teens. Public school was something for their grandchildren, though high school was still unusual for most.
Note: Jane T. Suttenfield Barbour was my third great-grandmother.
Sources:
Griswold, Bert. A Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Chicago: Robert O. Law Co., 1917.
Lancaster, Joseph. The British System of Education: Being a Complete Epitome of the Improvements and Inventions Practiced at the Royal Free Schools, Borough Road, Southwark,” London. 1810.
Mather, George R. Frontier Faith - The Story of the Pioneer Congregations of Fort Wayne, Indiana 1820-1860, Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 1992.
Mohl, Raymond A. “Education as Social Control in New York City, 1784-1825,” New York History, Vol. 51, No. 3 (April 1970), pp. 219-237.
Murphey, Kathleen A. “Schooling, Teaching and Change in Nineteenth-Century Fort Wayne, Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol 94, No. 1 (March 1998), pp. 1-28.
Rayman, Ronald. “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education, 1815-1838,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter 1981,) pp. 395-409.
Schultz, George. An Indian Canaan: Isaac McCoy and the Vision of an Indian State, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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