Doty/Gravel Lawn

It appears as though Green Township’s first District 1 school was established just northeast of where it sits today. In 1880, it was shown at the northeastern corner of what’s now West County Road 1000-South and Indiana State Road 13 on farmland owned by the Cotterell family (Kingman, 1880).

In 1901 it was shown at its current location on land owned by Thomas Jenkins Doty, whose surname gave the school its first colloquial name (American, 1901). The present structure seems to have been built in 1909 (Madison, 2021). 

The school’s common designation of Gravel Lawn came after the adjacent cemetery was established in 1914 when neighbor Charles Hiday sold seven acres of his land to a board of trustees (Crowe, 2015a).

The District 1: Doty/Gravel Lawn schoolhouse served students until 1930, when Green Township’s Center School opened as a consolidation between District 1 and the Hardscrabble school, District 3 (Crowe, 2015b). 

Located at the southeast corner of West County Road 800-South and IN-13, the Center school closed in 1971. After nearly fifty years of disuse, the building was demolished in 2021. The old District 1 schoolhouse, meanwhile, still stands as a private dwelling.

References

Kingman Brothers. (1880). History of Madison County, Indiana with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches. Chicago, IL.

(1901). Stony Creek Township. An atlas of Madison County, Indiana. map, Cleveland, OH; American Atlas Company. 

Madison County Office of Information & GIS Services. (2021). Parcel ID: 48-15-33-400-001.000-014.

Crowe, R. (2015, September 3). Gravel Lawn Cemetery marks its centennial. The Greenfield Daily Reporter. p. 20. 

Crowe, R. (2015, April 16). One teacher looms large in Center School history. The Greenfield Daily Reporter. p. 20.