The Eden School

Eden School marker stone

We've covered quite a few, if not most, of the old, 19th Century schools of Mill Creek Hundred. These schools sat one to a district, and the districts (as they were in 1868) can be seen in the colorful map in the upper right-hand side of the page. The first of these districts were created as a result of the Free School Act of 1829, which was the first real attempt to make education available for Delaware children. The districts were each designed to hold about 35 students, with a small schoolhouse in which they would receive their rudimentary education. The funding to build the school and pay the teacher (from what I can tell there usually was only one per school) was derived from a school tax paid by the residents of said district.

However, as you can imagine, education in Delaware and in Mill Creek Hundred specifically did not begin in 1829. Although fewer in number than in later years, there were schools prior to the Free School Act. An earlier attempt at school funding created a fund for schools for poor children, with the money coming from marriage and tavern taxes. (Maybe because marriage and drinking are the two most common causes of children??) However, this was A) underfunded, and B) parents were reluctant to send their children there, in the process admitting they were indigent. If there was such a school in MCH, I am unaware of it.

Another, more common type of school was the subscription school. It was sort of like a local private school, with families paying a monthly tuition to the teacher. In reality, I don't think it was much of a transition into the public school system, with the school tax being just a mandatory "tuition", and the school board commissioners acting as middlemen. (And it should be noted that all these were, of course, only for white children.) The only such subscription school I had been aware of was the one founded in 1808 near Old St. James Church, west of Stanton. However, the story of another old school was recently brought to my attention.

Lisa Sinclair, the local resident and researcher who brought us the Mystery Stone Structure off of Little Baltimore Road, also mentioned tales of the Eden School. At the time I had too much going on to look into it, but Lisa recently raised the stakes, so I had to find out more. At first, I could find only two vague references to the existence of such a school. In a 2013 Hockessin Community News article about the unveiling of a historical marker for the original Hockessin school for African-Americans, historian Joe Lake mentions the Eden School. He states that, "Near the intersection of Doe Run and Little Baltimore Roads, there was once a chunk of limestone reading 'Eden School'. Eden was a hamlet on the Delaware-Pennsylvania border. Neither state has any records of such a school."

Another, albeit very brief, mention of the school was in the 1887 obituary of Jacob Heald. In it is stated that Jacob, a MCH native and brother of developer Joshua T. Heald, "...taught the Eden district school in Mill Creek Hundred for one year." This would have been in the 1820's, and is more proof that the school actually did exist. The last clue came, as it so happens, from Jacob's older brother Henry Heald. Henry was a surveyor and mapmaker, and created a map of the roads of New Castle County in 1820. The MCH section of it can be seen below.

MCH section of Henry Heald's 1820 map of New Castle County

Unlike our later 19th Century maps, this one shows (in addition to the roads) only meeting houses, mills, workshops, taverns, and schools. It does not show landowners and properties, so it's usually less helpful. In this case, though, the inclusion of schools (marked by a solid square) does help us. The aforementioned St. James school can be seen, as well as the original Harmony school on Limestone Road. There is one in Hockessin (across from the Friends Meeting House) and one that appears to be in the same location as the later White Clay Creek School. I could find no more information on that one, which is why it was not mentioned in the prior post. There is also a school that appears to be across the road from Red Clay Creek Presbyterian, labeled "Stone", although that name might refer to the church.

Most relevant for us now, however, is the inclusion of the Eden School towards the upper left. It is shown exactly where Joe Lake said it was, on the northwest corner of Little Baltimore Road and Doe Run Road. That tells us it was in place before 1820, which fits perfectly with the "lost" artifact that Lisa rediscovered for us. Remember how Lake said there was a stone? (You must, it was only three paragraphs ago.) Well, Lisa found it! Shown at the top of the page, the stone sits at the entrance to the development on the north side of Little Baltimore Road, along what was the northern extension of Doe Run Road. It may be hard to see in the picture, but the worn inscription reads "EDEN", then "1814" underneath. It was obviously made to mark something called Eden, and I have every reason to believe it was done in 1814.

Since it doesn't specifically say "School", I thought maybe it could mark a farm or estate. As a longshot, I looked up land records for John Walker, who would have owned the land on the NE side around that time. I thought maybe he bought his farm then, named it Eden, and memorialized it with a stone. What I actually stumbled across was even better, and part of it can be seen below.

Part of the 1814 deed from Daniel Thompson to the school subscribers

I know these are hard to read, and this one especially, but what this is is the beginning of the grant in December 1814 of a small lot from Daniel Thompson to 19 men -- 11 from Pennsylvania and 8 from Delaware. The highlighted part says, "...Daniel Thompson being desired to promote useful learning for the benefit of the arising youth..." Later in the document it states that the land is to be used for the building and keeping in repair of a schoolhouse. It never says the name Eden, but I don't think there's any doubt that this is the beginnings of the school.

The final piece of at least this part of the puzzle was to determine exactly where the school lot was. Luckily that was not too difficult, since it nestled in the corner of Hendersons Road (today's Little baltimore Road) and "the New road leading from Thomas Brown's limestone quarry" (Doe Run Road extension northward, now a private drive). The lot has a rhombus shape, with four equal sides of 2½ perches, or 41 feet 3 inches. Give or take a few feet for the road placements at the time, the location of the lot is shown below.

Approximate location of the Eden School lot

It seems likely that Eden only operated as a true subscription school for little more than 15 years. It probably began serving as the public school sometime soon after 1829, until the North Star School was built down the road in about 1847. This leaves us with only two lingering questions. The first is that in some accounts the school is located just over the state line in Pennsylvania. One possible explanation is that it later moved to a site over the line. However, I think it's more likely that in the memories of it passed down years after it closed, because of the fact that many of the students originally lived in PA, it ended up being thought of as a PA school. I can only assume that those students no longer attended after it became a Delaware public school, but anything is possible.

The final mystery leads into a more lingering one -- what of this "hamlet" of Eden that Joe Lake mentioned? Where exactly was it centered? Was the school named after it, or was the community named after the school? The name certainly hung around, as we saw in a previous post that the Wilmington & Western had an Eden Station just a few thousand feet north of there, named in the 1870's. Information on the area back 200 years and more is quite sparse, but I hold out hope that these questions might someday be answered, just as was the mystery of Eden School.