Narvoo/Nauvoo

Ward Township’s first District 2 school was located on a section of Jasper A. Sipe’s land (Griffing, 1874) that had been deeded to the township on September 1, 1856 (Hinshaw, 2008). The schoolhouse is visible at that site on maps published as late as 1882 (Tucker, 1882). 

The District 2 schoolhouse was commonly known as the Narvoo or Nauvoo school, a Hebrew word that apparently means “a place of rest or beauty (Leonard, 1992).”

At some point, a brick schoolhouse was established about a third of a mile east of the original building, at the southwestern corner of North County Road 100-East and East County Road 900-North. The school was in use until 1911, when its students were sent to Ward Township’s new Jefferson consolidated school just south of nearby Deerfield (Public, 2018). 

Though the students of the Jefferson School used the building as a gymnasium for some time after its closure (Hinshaw), today the old schoolhouse is used for agricultural purposes.

References

Hinshaw, G. (2008). A History of Education in Randolph County, Indiana. Retrieved February 13, 2022.

Griffing, B. N. (1874). Ward Township. An atlas of Randolph County, Indiana . map, Philadelphia, PA; Griffing, Gordon, & Company.

Tucker, E. (1882). History of Randolph County, Indiana. book. Chicago, IL; A.L. Kingman. 

Leonard, G.M. (1992). Encylopedia of Mormonism. New York, NY. Macmillan Publishing Company.

Public Education in Randolph County, Indiana. 2018. Sharing history for 68 years in Randolph County, Indiana. Randolph County Historical Society and Museum. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from https://rchsmuseum.org/schools.