Community invited to Summit Chapel-School open house Saturday

Monday, August 12, 2024 at 11:10 PM

By Kathy Bottorff

The Wythougan Valley Preservation Council will be holding a free, informal public open house at Summit Chapel-School from this Saturday, August 17^th from 1:00-3:00 p.m.

The one-room schoolhouse is located two miles east of Highway 331 on Highway 10. The building was restored by Wythougan, Marshall County’s county-wide preservation organization, in 2001 to allow people to experience what one-room schools of the 19th century were like.

Summit Chapel-School was constructed about 1865 on a site given to the township by a local pioneer farming family for use as a school, church, and cemetery in 1842. A log building served as the original school, being built in 1855, but it suffered a fire and was replaced by the current building, named District #3 School.

The Summit Methodist Episcopal congregation used the building until they erected a separate church on the south side of the road in 1892. The congregation continued to use the building for dinners and preparation of flowers for decorating graves.

A cloakroom was added to the front of the building in about 1915 and the bell tower which summoned children to school was removed in the following decades.

The year 1928 ushered in the final year of operating the building as a school. Consolidation moved children to Tippecanoe into a unified building for the township. The building continued to serve the Methodist congregation and as a precinct polling station for the township until the early 1960s.

Wythougan Valley Preservation Council executed a long-term lease with the township to restore the building to function as a one-room schoolhouse and use it for educational programs. The school and adjacent cemetery were listed on the National Register in 2008.

This year, Wythougan celebrates its silver anniversary and will be having a celebratory presentation at its annual meeting in the fall.