#tipton

This is the former Beech Grove School in Tipton, Indiana, which Aly and I drove by on our way to a horn convention and had to stop for when we passed it.  While Tipton is relatively small today, with a population of only 5100, that number is slightly less than what it boasted in 1915, when it appears to have been a bustling industrial town served by two branches of the Lake Erie and Western.  The Beech Grove School seems to have been built to serve farming families on the outskirts of town, as the town had larger schools, being erected in 1914.  I found a history of sorts online, on a blog posted by a pastor now in Nashville, who claims some substantial family connections to it.

The schoolhouse he attended, Beech Grove School, took its name because it was built in front of an orchard of beech trees—a landmark dotting the flat, Indiana horizon. People could see it from miles away. Common sense had chosen the school’s name before a single brick was laid, just as it had chosen names for Cave Spring Road or Brick Church Lane...  Those trees were not part of the landscape I knew. But for one, they were all gone, and the one that did remain was, itself, mostly dead.

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In its early years, the Beech Grove School was the only place for miles where the migrant workers and farmers could send their children for a proper education. Eventually industry took hold in the area and the little town got organized. They built a courthouse, a post office, a hospital, a bank, and a new school closer to the center of things. The old schoolhouse stayed empty until a handful of faithful families converted it into a little church, which struggled along but somehow managed to survive under one name or another all the way up until the late 1980s. When the church at last closed its doors, the schoolhouse stood vacant until my father leased it as an office for his computer business.

- source

This history includes up to 1994, when the computer business was broken into as it began going downhill.  Presumably, the lease ended after that, and the history is somewhat murky for a few years.  A comment on the post from 2016 gives a further insight into it.

I am the current owner of the little Beech Grove school house. My father owned it and passed away in June 2014. He purchased it... in 2000 I believe. He was living in there with no running plumbing until his passing.

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It had been neglected over recent years and I am currently working with a local realtor on an interested party that would like to purchase and restore the school house. If this party does not buy the property, I am going to start giving it a face lift.