Eureka School photos
by Norma (Bender) Jennings
28 June 2013
(Photos contributed by the Washington County Historial Societ
y)

    Coordinator's note:  I  attended Eureka School in Marion twp from 1943-1945 (?) 4th to 7th grade.  This schoolhouse burned down while I attended there. An old abandoned residence was cleaned and painted to use for a few weeks until the end of the school year and a new school was built that summer. My father sawed the legs off of an old dining room chair that we had for me to use as a desk and we had to do our homework and use our laps as desks at school.  (We closed the school three days early that year when a bug fell down from the ceiling into the teacher's lap.  If I remember it correctly, it looked more like a lady bug to me, but the teacher panicked and thought it was a bedbug.)

After the school closed, the new building  was converted to a residence.  It had a nice concrete basement and we roller skated down there during recess time. During that period I fell while rollerskating and cracked my left wrist.

    Several of the families in this 1929-1930 photo were still living in the neighborhood when we lived there and were good friends of my family.  My husband and I once again lived in that neighborhood from 1953-1955.
nfj



Eureka Schoolhouse


Photo of 1930 Eureka students

More about the Eureka settlement:


Eureka
(Town histories at:  http://iagenweb.org/washington/w_town_histories.html )

    Eureka was laid out in April 1857, by Jacob Z Bowman. It was located on the northwest quarter of section 18, township 74, range 7.  It never aspired to become a town of great dimensions but was a trading point of some importance in the early years.

    The Methodist Episcopal Church of Eureka was organized in September of 1849, and a frame building erected in 1858. The Baptists had an organization at Eureka, which effected in 1856. A frame building was erected at that place by that denomination in 1870. (Note by nfj. - The Abraham Snider family from Preston County, West Virginia, (still Virginia at that time) moved to Marion Twp around 1857 shortly before or after his youngest son Abraham, Jr. was born.   His son Joseph Snider, b. 1841was sixteen years old. A few years later, Joseph Snider built a nice residence across the road from the Eureka Church.  Joseph Snider was my great grandfather.nfj)

    In 1880, it was written that Eureka has postal facilities and is surrounded by a beautiful and fertile section of country. In the early days there was a post office located on Crooked Creek, near the east part of the Township, called Marcellus. this office however has long since been discontinued.