Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PIONEER SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL MASTERS. BY D. C. SHILLING. One of the most striking facts found in a study of the history of the Ohio Valley is the early appearance of the log schoolhouse. When the primitive conditions of the country, together with the everpresent danger from Indian attacks are taken into consideration, one is forced to conclude that only a sincere and abiding faith in the efficacy of popular education prompted the pioneers to make the sacrifices necessary to disseminate the rudiments of a liberal education among their children. Another striking fact in the history of the Ohio Valley is the diversity of racial elements among the early settlers. Thus we find the sons of New England and the sons of the upland South, together with a considerable foreign element, living in close proximity, each representing ideals of its own. However, it appears that on the question of educating their children they occupied quite common ground. The educational activities of the New England settlements have been emphasized from almost every possible viewpoint, while the intellectual attainments of the non-New England settlements have been an unexplored field until quite recently. In the educational refalm as in the political the New England element did most of the literary work of the day and charges are not wanting that other settlements have suffered from unfair comparisons. A recent writer1 of Scotch-Irish extraction points out that by means of the every busy and facile pens of the noble Puritan fathers, the belief has taken deep root in the eastern states and it is not without adherents in the west, that the preeminent position Ohio maintains as an element of the Republic is wholly due to the remarkable fecundity, mental and physical, of the ‘Hunter, W. H., In Ohio A…
