USA > Illinois > Macoupin County > History of Macoupin County, Illinois : biographical and pictorial, Volume I > Part 31
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In 1906 a movement was inaugurated to increase the endowment. Andrew Carnegie offered $20,000 on condition that $50,000 more be raised in cash. The condition was met and $70,000 was added to the resources of the school. In 1908, by the settlement of the John A. Harris estate, $20,000 came into the treas- ury of the college and in 1910 other bequests added to the endowment fund.
The resources of the college consists of :
I. The campus farm of eighty acres, on twenty acres of which a state agri- cultural experiment station is located. Ten acres are used for college purposes exclusively, in the campus and athletic fields.
2. Three buildings: University Hall, costing about $50,000; Robertson Hall, erected for scientific purposes by the late Dr. William A. Robertson and wife, at a cost of $12,000 ; and the Minton Observatory, named for Professor Robert B. Minton.
3. The Taylor Museum, containing between thirty and forty thousand min- eral and fossil specimens, the gift for the most part of the late Dr. Julius S. Taylor, of Kankakee, Illinois, obtained through the influence of President Hurd.
The citizens of Carlinville are rightfully proud of Blackburn University and of their other educational facilities and why shouldn't they be? Blackburn Uni- versity and its surrounding campus of eighty acres can not be excelled for beauty and its inviting green swards with its large forest trees composed of elm and oak with wide branching tops make shade for the reclining student in his studies. As to the course of study Blackburn embraces all the requisites of the best and larger colleges of our state for the obtaining of a practical education and Ma- Vol. 1-17
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coupin County owes to Dr. Blackburn a debt of gratitude for his great foresight and courage in selecting our city and county for the institution that so appro- priately bears his name, and we feel that we would be recreant to his good name and deeds did we not give testimony to the character of the educational work accomplished by this institution and no better tribute can be found than in the high and honorable position accorded to the graduates of Blackburn University. In the learned professions and in all the varied business avocations of this won- derful business age, they nowhere fall behind the graduates of the larger and more expensive colleges and universities of this state.
THE REV. GIDEON BLACKBURN, D. D.
Gideon Blackburn was born in Augusta county, Virginia, August 27, 1772, his father being Robert Blackburn and his mother a member of the Richie fam- ily. His parents were of Scotch-Irish ancestry and devout members of the Presbyterian church.
Gideon made his home much of the time until his twelfth year with his grandfather, General Blackburn, and owed his educational opportunities for the most part to his maternal uncle, Gideon Richie, for whom he had been named. In the current of westward migration the family settled for a time in Washing- ton county, Tennessee, (then within the bounds of North Carolina), where the boy was placed under the care and instruction of the Rev. Samuel Doak, D. D., a distinguished minister and teacher, the founder and principal of Martin Academy. At this school the greater part of his literary course was taken. Sev- enty miles farther west, at Dandridge, Tennessee, under the Rev. Dr. Robert Henderson, his advanced literary and theological studies were pursued. By the Presbytery of Abingdon, (Tennessee), he was licensed to preach in 1792 and
ordained to the full work of the ministry in 1794. In April, 1724, he accepted a call to the New Providence (Maryville, Tenn.,) and Eusebia churches and began his pastoral duties. Those were the days when congregations went armed to church and ministers preached with rifles by their sides because of danger from the Indians. The Cherokees were on the warpath. Work was done and trips were made in companies. The people lived in settlements or behind the walls of forts. The young minister did his share of the common labor and took his part of the dangers. When the Cherokees became more tractable he established mis- sions and schools for them, collecting considerable amounts of money in the north for this purpose and discontinuing the work only when health and financial embarrassment, growing out of his personal sacrifices for the mission, made it necessary.
In 1811 he removed to Franklin, Williamson county, Tennessee, eighteen miles south of Nashville, to take charge of Harpeth Academy and afterwards Independent Academy in the same county and to evangelize the surrounding region. A considerable change was made in the religious sentiment of the coun- try within a radius of fifty miles. While here, in 1818, Greeneville College, Ten- nessee, gave him the degree of Doctor of Divinity.
Remaining in Williamson county for twelve years, he, in 1823, became the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Louisville, Kentucky. After a suc-
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DR. GIDEON BLACKBURN
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cessful pastorate of four years he accepted the presidency of Centre College, Dan- ville, Kentucky, where he remained for three years. Returning to the pastorate he remained at Versailles, Kentucky, for three years and' thence came to central Illinois, in 1833. For a time he was financial agent for Illinois College at Jack- sonville but the last years of his life were given to founding a theological sem- inary for the central west. His efforts resulted in the establishment of Black- burn University, at Carlinville, Illinois.
In the early part of the winter of 1837-8 Dr. Blackburn slipped and fell on. the ice, so seriously injuring the hip-joint that he never walked again. August 23, 1838, he fell asleep, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.
October 3, 1793, he was married to Miss Grizzel Blackburn, a distant relative. Of eleven children, seven sons and four daughters, two sons became ministers and one son died while fitting himself for the ministry.
Dr. Blackburn was a new school Presbyterian, throwing himself heart and soul into the struggle for what he believed to be the truth. Yet in his manners he was of the old school of gentlemen, easy, gentle, courteous, mild, affable, always dignified, even somewhat reserved. His bearing was naturally military and on occasion he could be severe and haughty. He ruled well his own house- hold and the youth entrusted to his care in the academies and the college of which he was the head. His knowledge of and instruction in logic, rhetoric, mental and moral philosophy, was broad and illuminating. In his preaching he was ex tem- pore, didactic, vividly descriptive, witching. His voice was silvery, his person and manner elegant, his zeal contagious, his logic convincing and his eloquence inspiring. Men heard him, went away and came to hear him again. He was laborious and earnest, a man and Christian of the active rather than the con- templative type. He did things and he believed more in a religion of keeping the commandments than in one of . "frames and feelings." He believed in Providence and accepted trial and sorrow as well as prosperity and happiness as coming from God. He was a man of men and a man of God.
CHAPTER XIV.
PIONEER SCHOOLS.
THE PEDAGOGUE AND THE SCHOOLHOUSE OF EARLY DAYS-THE TEACHER "BOARDED 'ROUND" AND TOOK "POT LUCK"-NO "LAUGHING OUT IN SCHOOL" ALLOWED- SCHOOLHOUSES WITHOUT WINDOWS SIMPLY A "HOLE IN THE WALL."
A history of the county without noticing the educational interests, would be incomplete, and yet we are unable to give much valuable information in regard to the early school system of the county. The fact is, the early schools of the county were like angel's visits are said to be, "few and far between," and the whole educational system-if system it may be called-of Macoupin county, in common with the state was almost without order or management. There were good schools taught but as compared with the present system and its advantages, they were far inferior. There were some good "schoolmasters" in those days who were very successful in rearing the tender minds and "teaching the young ideas how to shoot," but the majority were but poorly qualified for the duties of instructors. The popular standard of education was low, owing to the pe- culiar incidents and surroundings of pioneer life. The country was sparsely settled and the people generally poor, and however anxious they may have been for good educational advantages, it was utterly impossible to obtain them. But few who had qualified themselves for the profession of teaching wandered so far west. The schoolmaster was generally some unfortunate, poverty stricken wretch who had been wafted to the outskirts of civilization and had become snow bound, water bound or frost bitten, and was compelled to "take up a school" to keep soul and body together until a favorable opportunity presented itself for him to get to his destination, or back to his home in the east. Not infrequently did it happen that a man was to be found who was too lazy, in the popular estimation, for anything else than a schoolteacher, who was induced to pass around his "subscription for signers" and "take up" a school. Some people seemed to have entertained the idea that laziness was one of the qualifications of a schoolteacher. The Biblical camel could about as well accomplish the needle's eye feat as one of these living specimens of inertia could properly manage and "keep a school" in those days, when the big boys were boiling over with mischief and had no great respect for the restraint of the schoolroom anyhow. The teachers were of necessity poorly paid, and all things considered, perhaps, ren- dered as much instruction in proportion to the compensation as those of the present day. It was certainly no pleasant task in those days the teacher had to
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perform. He usually "boarded round" with the scholars and in this respect was like a stray dog, having no fixed place of abode. He was compelled to make long and laborious journeys to and from his temporary stopping places, which, taken in connection with the fact that the poor fellow was often poorly clad and possessed no great amount of vitality at any rate, rendered him an object of mingled commiseration and pity. He was likewise made the target at which was hurled all the knotty questions of theology, mathematics, science and politics, that had descended down to the different households from generation to generation.
These knotty problems were piled on the poor' pedagogue promiscuously and in pell-mell order, as though he were a creature of infinite power and had the ability to solve them, seriatim, by some magical power to the populace unknown. The big boys of the neighboring district poured in on the poor fellow all sorts of mathematical questions that would have puzzled the arithmetic makers themselves, and it was a forfeiture of his standing in the community if he did not furnish a solution and prove his demonstration by the rules of Smiley or Adams. It was not infrequent in later days that the school-master was put through a most critical examination on Kirkham or Smith, by pater- familias, to determine his fitness to teach Sarah Jane the rudiments of Eng- lish grammar, and woe betide the unfortunate pedagogue if by chance he happened to transgress the ipse dixit of the inquisitor's favorite author. He was, also the neighborhood calculator of interest on all the paid and unpaid notes of the community and was expected to furnish each family with the mathematical data as to the required number of hogs, at a given price, to purchase the ad- joining forty acres at the next sale of the land office. He was also expected to furnish to order reasonable and satisfactory arguments for combatting the heretical dogmas of preacher so-and-so, who had a short time previous come near capturing the whole neighborhood with his "new light" doctrines or anti- total-depravity theories.
He also had divers other difficulties to meet and overcome. He was actually compelled to court the good graces of the young men who were his pupils. They were sometimes disposed on slight provocation to plot treason against the government, which sometimes ripened into overt acts. It often happened that open rebellion existed and the poor teacher was subjected to a pummeling at the hands of the refractory members of his school. At other times the parents themselves, for grievances they supposed justifiable, took the law into their own hands and inflicted upon the offending master a punishment entirely too serious for a well regulated community to tolerate. An instance is related of one poor fellow who had offended his patrons, being compelled to make the best record known in the community, in the shape of a foot race, being urged on and on in front of a pair of brutal stogas which were propelled by an irate father. His coat tails are said to have ever and anon floated high in the air at the touch of the swearing, raging, pursuing ursine. Whether henceforth the offending teacher became a wanderer, disconsolate and heart broken, like Ichabod Crane, is not stated.
Other instances might be given where ye pedagogue was bound hand and foot by his pupils, taken by force of arms from his castle, as it were, and ducked in the creek or frog pond, and that, too, when the temperature was almost
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as frigid as it is supposed to be on the north side of the icebergs in Iceland. There was also a habit in early days of barring the teacher out of the schoolhouse on Christmas if he would not treat the school to apples, candy or something of that nature equally as significant. It is even said that the demands of the elder portion of the male pupils were often for a jug of something stronger and more exhilarating. This was a custom originating no one knows where, at one time rigidly adhered to but now passed away with many other aforetime usages.
The teacher had his pleasures and enjoyments as well. It was not all thorns and thistles that grew along his pathway. A few flowers,-puny, sickly blos- soms of the morning glory order, to us they might seem but flowers, neverthe- less-also grew among them. He was one of the lords of creation, as he boarded around from house to house. There was nothing too good in the eating line, from the dried pumpkins that hung in strings on the wall, to honey and venison and wild turkey, that was not placed before him. There was nothing but the dyspepsia that prevented the revolving teacher from faring sumptuously every day; and few remember of having seen a schoolteacher in those days of long walks and airy schoolhouses, who was a dyspeptic. The general experience of the good old housewives of those days is, that a schoolteacher who had eaten a cold dinner, or no dinner at all, and then after school "was out" had walked from two to five miles to his evening domicile and had his appetite whetted by the ap- petizing aroma that rose from the semicircle of cooking victuals in front of the old fashioned fire place, could come as near reading his title clear to earthly en- joyment as any one. He was generally able to do ample and complete justice to the repast, so to speak. There was enjoyment in it. He was ipso facto for the time being, lord of all he surveyed, and he surveyed with a kind of otium cum dignitate grace that would make a hungry mortal feel glorious.
If he had any knack at all in story telling, he was undoubtedly edified in sitting around the fireside during the long winter evenings and dealing out to the listening household those startling stories that have descended down from gen- erations and have accumulated in size and horror at almost every repetition. Old grandma, too, was often on hand with her stories of goblins and ghosts, that made the little folks as well as the teacher, feel shaky and down hearted and almost afraid to move. There were in those early days when most people had nothing to read, except, perhaps, the Testament, Peep of Day, Life of Boone, or Marion, much real enjoyment in story telling and the teacher was always expected to do his duty in this regard, or else be voted an uncommon bore. And then he was the generalissimo at all the parties and gatherings, from the "apple pealings" up to the wedding. At the latter place he was regarded as but little lower than the parson himself and was expected to furnish the fun necessary for the occasion-and it was usually a very cheap order of fun re- quired, for on such occasions the whole assembly was easily set wild with mirth and laughter on the slightest of provocations. An old fashioned wedding with the teacher left out was not regarded as altogether a success. The materials were all there but it lacked a free and easy sort of a fellow, such as the teacher usually was, to set the giggling machinery a-going.
But it was in the schoolroom of those early days that the teacher showed his powers to the greatest advantage. There he was the supreme autocrat and
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ruled usually with a kind of sledge hammer bravado that was a terror to little urchins. The moment he called "books" there was a mingled expression of sternness and gravity that settled on his austere brow, as though he was born to rule the storm. That very moment he became transposed from Philip drunk, to Philip sober, as it were; and he gathered up all the hilarious faculties about him and drowned them out as if thenceforth and forever he expected to remain an iceberg of despair and solemnity. When he spoke, he spoke as one having authority, and his orders were peremptory and absolute. There was no look of compromise in his appearance and the black flag was kept continually un- furled from his ramparts. On the morning school commenced, he read a string of rules as long as the code of Napoleon, and altogether more stringent. These rules he carried in his hat, read once a day, by way of warning, and in the enforcing of which he directed more energy, mental and physical, than to im- parting instruction. There stood in the corner, or lay concealed in the desk, a weapon of daily use, of hickory or hazel origin. This he used as a war measure, both offensive and defensive. It was not used as a dernier resort, but as a first resort, and that, too, often quite vigorously. When the offending urchin had passed the line prescribed by the oft repeated rules, no matter whether intentional or not, down came the rod, if for no other reason than to show the inexorable quality of the aforesaid rules. Order was the first law of heaven and the keeping of order was the keeping of the rules. If, for instance, the rules said "no laughing out in school allowed," and by the merest accident and wholly unintentional, the most innocent little titter was heard above the surrounding din, the dogs of war were let loose and the offender dragged to jus- tice. Who that has ever been in school with a lot of little, mirth loving children, all bubbling over with fun, and does not know that there are little incidents occurring in the schoolroom daily that it would be worse than death itself if the little fellows could not laugh. Just as well try to dam up the Niagara at the rapids as suppress one of these involuntary laughs in a child full of spirit and life. "It won't down." Yet the teacher had his rules and these rules were absolutely without provisos, and he enforced them without an if or a but. He regarded it as a kind of dot-your-i-and-cross-your-t-transaction. The act was sure to bring on the penalty without regard to intention or any other element of crime.
The method of teaching was also quite different from that of the present day. It is hardly susceptible of accurate description. It is one of those things that ought to be seen to be duly appreciated. The school books were very few. Webster's spelling book was the book used by beginners, usually; though, .per- haps, not used in the first schools of the county. There was the old English reader that succeeded next in order, after the spelling book. But few, however, were able to obtain it. There was no uniformity in the school books. Almost every family of children had a different kind of book, which their parents had used in their school days, and had handed down usually in a good state of preservation. It was not unusual that the children learned their a, b, c's from a shingle, upon which the letters were cut or made with chalk or charcoal. The New Testament was often used as a reader for all grades of advancement. It answered the purpose of a first, second, third, fourth or fifth reader. It was
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in arithmetic, however, that the defects of the early system of educational train- ing were the most apparent. In this there was absolutely no order or system. There were no classes and each pupil, provided with an arithmetic, slate and pencil, "ciphered" on at his own pleasure, without explanation or verification. He was required to commit the rules to memory, or so much of them as was printed in italics. This done, he launched out into the solution of the problems, having but one object in view, and that was to obtain the answer given. The whys and wherefores of the different steps taken in procuring the answer were matters of no concern whatever. The "sum" stated, and the thus saith the rule, were all the pupil desired and all that the teacher required. It was a kind of me- chanical process that he went through, without being able to give a single reason for a single step taken, except the mere fact that the rule said so and so. When the pupil came to an example, which, after a trial or two, he failed to obtain the answer given, he reported the fact to the teacher and the solution was given on the slate, often without explanation, and the pupil returned to his place in the schoolroom satisfied, not because he understood the modus operandi, but because he had the required answer. This process was kept up until the pupil had progressed as far as the "single" or perhaps the "double rule of three," which was generally regarded as the ultima thule in mathematical education, and that, too, quite often from an inability on the part of the teacher to conduct-if conduct it may be called-his pupil farther. All that lay beyond that, as a usual thing, was as a sealed book-a frozen sea on which the pupil dared not, or considered it useless, to venture. The arithmetics of the early days were far inferior and less suitable for pupils than those of today. The old dry pages of Duball, with their pounds, shillings and pence, would make a fit subject for comparison with the old bar-shear plow of fifty years ago. If these two articles of the past were not on exhibition at the Centennial of 1876, they should have been, as mementoes of the past to mark our onward steps of progress.
English grammar was a study seldom pursued. It was considered as rather too effeminate in its nature for the hardy sons who grew up in the early days of the county. It was sometimes studied, however, by the girls, as being more suitable to their natures and mental characteristics. It was not until within the last few years that anatomy, physiology and hygiene were made a part of the common-school curriculum. The laws of life and health were singularly omitted in the education of the children under the old system of education. It was con- sidered, however, as highly. proper that the children should spend nine-tenths of their school days in learning to spell the contents of Webster's Elementary from asperity to the pictures, without for once learning the simplest rudiments per- taining to the preservation of health and life.
The methods of recitation and teachings were different from those of today, and the modes of study and deportment of the pupils were also very different. It was quite common during school hours for all the pupils to study aloud, some reading, some spelling, some reciting, some in one tone of voice and some in another, and all striving, seemingly, to make a bedlam equal to Babel. There were swells in the general racket when it seemed impossible to distinguish in the din, one idea of human origin or sense. The noise and confusion were worse confounded than the jabbering of an army of monkeys in Africa. This would
HIGH SCHOOL
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"Public School Building", Brighton, Ills.
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Gillespie High School Staunton School-rear view showing also the Primary Department, which is separate from the main building Public School, Bunker Hill New Public School. Palmyra
Staunton School Public School, Mt. Olive Old Public School, Palmyra Brighton Public School
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gradually die out until some little urchin, alone, would be heard unconsciously conning over his b-a-k-e-r baker, s-h-a-d-y shady-the only audible sound to be heard in the whole room. He, too, when nudged in the side by some seat mate, would see the ridiculousness of the situation and relapse into profound silence. Then the condition of affairs would fitly illustrate the saying that "after a storm the sea grows calm."
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