The New Taft Middle School is under construction at 5235 E. 121st Avenue in Winfield. This is a hallway in the academic wing of the school shown in late November.
CROWN POINT — School officials won’t name its newest school campus for the pioneer woman who was the county’s first teacher.
Crown Point Community School Corp. Superintendent Todd Terrill said the district will keep Robert A. Taft as the name of the middle school when it opens this fall in Winfield.
That disappoints amateur historian Thomas Hawes, sexton of the city’s Historic Maplewood Cemetery, and others pressing for what they call overdue honors to Harriet Warner Holton.
Holton, a daughter of an American Revolutionary War general, traveled by wagon train to Crown Point in 1835 and opened her log cabin home to students as the first common school in Lake County.
The district has put the names of men who were either a U.S. senator, a general, a Civil War hero, the city's founder and even NASA Astronaut Jerry Ross over its schools' front doors.
“It’s a crime we don’t have a school named after a woman,” Hawes said.
He also wants the district to name the current Taft campus, which will be repurposed as administrative offices and an alternative school, in memory of William Haan, a Crown Point native and World War I general.
Byron “B. J.” Hubbard, who served many years as a Crown Point school principal and school board member, joins Hawes' crusade. “I think schools should be named after special teachers, people who have given their lives to education.”
Ross, an alumnus of Taft Middle School and veteran of seven Space Shuttle missions, wrote last summer, “I enthusiastically support the efforts to connect the names of General W.G. Haan and Harriett Warner Holton to the new facilities.”
Debbie Thill, an officer of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, agrees. “Harriet Holton, a true daughter of the revolution, risked her life to come and teach here. Surely, she should be honored.”
Hawes has been rebuffed in earlier efforts to rechristen Taft school.
As a former school board member told The Times in 1997, the Taft name has sentimental value for generations of students who have attended and played for its sports teams.
Hawes said he thought now was the perfect opportunity to retire the Robert A. Taft name, along with the current structure.
Hawes arranged a meeting late last year with the superintendent to make his pitch, but “I had hardly sat down before (Terrill) said he wouldn’t be changing the Taft Middle School name."
Terrill issued a statement confirming, “I appreciated the opportunity to meet with Mr. Hawes and listen to his suggestions and research."
“Because the Taft building is a relocation of an existing school, not a new school, the district has no plans to change the name. If a time comes that our district builds a new school, we will seriously consider the historical input Mr. Hawes has provided in order to choose a name,” he stated in an email to The Times.
The school district is in the midst of a $100 million expansion of its high school and elementary schools and is spending another $78 million for the new home of the Taft Middle School on 121st Avenue, which will serve up to 1,500 students when it opens this fall.
It will replace a school built in 1954 and named for Robert A. Taft, son of William Howard Taft Jr., the 27th president of the United States and a U.S. senator from Ohio.
Hawes said that despite the fact Taft had no connection to Lake County, the name stuck through its consolidation with Crown Point schools and its transformations from elementary, junior high and currently a middle school.
He said that is in stark contrast to Holton's bold decision to trek across 200 miles to a newly settled wilderness that was Crown Point and make a name for herself. As Lake County historian Timothy Ball wrote, Holton "was in some respects the most remarkable woman that ever lived in Lake County, ... a woman whose memory the teachers who have succeeded her ought to cherish.”
Holton moved from her New England home to the then newly formed state of Indiana in 1817 where she lived and taught school downstate as she and her husband raised a daughter and two sons.
In the winter of 1835, Holton, widowed and looking for new opportunities, and her adult children moved north and crossed an ice-covered Kankakee River Marsh to Lake County, then the abode of Native Americans of the Pottawatomie tribe, fur trappers and the newly settled town of Crown Point, population 21.
While pioneer churches offered Sunday school Bible studies, Holton began what was then called a common school — secular, but not the publicly financed educational institution that would arise years later.
Jill Weiss Simins, a historian for the Indiana State Library’s historical bureau, said the log cabin schoolhouses of the 1830s were rough hewn cabins illuminated only by the daylight through windows.
She said an account of one in southern Indiana stated students came by a long walk to occupy benches, not desks to learn reading and penmanship, grammar skills, mathematics, botany, surveying and music.
Holton remained in Lake County until her death, at age 97, in 1880. She is buried at Crown Point’s Historic Maplewood Cemetery.
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