No roads leading to it

In the spring of 1834 John Manning came up from Mercer County, Ohio, a few days behind Jacob Notestine's flatboat, and took a tract of land on section 15 of what would become Cedar Creek Township. That summer the two men planted the first corn in it. That fall they sowed the first wheat.

Three years later there were enough families along the St. Joseph River for the county commissioners to act. In September 1837 they ordered that Township 32 North, Range 13 East, be organized as Cedar Creek, 35.58 square miles on the De Kalb County line, with the St. Joseph cutting across it from the northeast.

The same year somebody built a schoolhouse. It went up near the center of the township, which on a surveyor's plat is the sensible place for a building meant to serve every family equally. On the ground it was a poor one.

"It was situated near the swamp," the township's historian wrote in 1880, "and was quite inaccessible, as there were no roads leading to it, and few children within the vicinity. It was never used for the purpose, and was left to decay."

He names nobody who built it and nobody who ordered it. He says it was a log building, and nothing more about it survives in his account.

It did serve once. The township's first election, by his telling, was held in it in 1837. "The voting-precinct was so remote from the inhabited part of the township, that not more than half of the voters found their way to it." Those who arrived elected Joseph Silvers and John B. Blue justices of the peace and Thomas Wilson constable. Afterward the election was ordered held at the house of John Manning.

The historian was L. H. Newton, and his is the earliest account of the schoolhouse that survives. No record made in 1837 has been found to confirm it.

The next historian to write about the township did not tell it the same way. In 1889 the township's first election appears in another county history with the same three officers, but at the house of Jacob Notestine, and with a number: "The total poll was twelve votes." That book says nothing about a schoolhouse.

In 1917 a third historian put the two together. He kept the schoolhouse, the swamp and the lost voters, and added the twelve. "The first election is said to have been held there," he wrote, "but it is probable that it was merely attempted." The school fared no better: "information as to where the first term of school was really taught is not at hand."

None of the three says where his account came from.

The first count that can be checked against the paper it was printed in comes four years after the schoolhouse. On 3 May 1841 Allen County voted for a member of Congress, and the Sentinel printed the official return by township. Cedar Creek cast 24 votes: 6 for Andrew Kennedy, the Democrat, 18 for McCarty and none for Smith.

The men elected at the log schoolhouse stayed in the record. When the township got a post office in 1847, it was named Leo, John Manning was its postmaster, and the office was kept at John B. Blue's store, with Blue acting as deputy. Ten years later the commissioners appointed "Mr J. B. Blue, of Cedar Creek" county auditor, to fill the place of a man who had died in office.

The schools came later, and by law. The public school system reached the township in 1857, and within a few years each district had a building. In 1858 the county offered for sale land in section 16 because a buyer had stopped paying the interest he owed "the school fund of Cedar Creek township."

By 1880 there were ten school buildings in the township and 593 scholars enrolled. The atlas of 1898 marks the schoolhouses by number. By then there was a village near the center of the township, called Leo, and one of the numbered schoolhouses stood on the road at its edge.