Tom Dueringer speaks to a crowd of about 50 people attending Thursday’s Miner Grade School historical marker dedication event. The event celebrated the installation of a historical marker at the former site of the one-room school house built by his great-grandfather in 1885 about two miles north of Guthrie.PHOTO CREDIT: Will Brumleve/Ford County Chronicle
By WILL BRUMLEVE
will@fordcountychronicle.com
GUTHRIE — An event celebrating the installation of a historical marker at the original site of the Miner Grade School was held Thursday, drawing a small crowd that included a number of descendants of the one-room school house’s original owner, John Mottes Miner.
Miner’s great-grandson Tom Dueringer organized the event after extensively researching the history of the one-room school house and its significance to the history of education in Ford County, then successfully applying for the historical marker to be installed through the Illinois State Historical Society.
The Miner Grade School was located at the site of the historical marker — on land northeast of the intersection of Ford County roads 700 East and 900 North, about two miles north of Guthrie in Sullivant Township — from the day it was built in 1885 to December 1954, when the school house was purchased by the Guthrie Grain Co. and subsequently moved to nearby Guthrie for use as the company’s new office.
The school house was used as a school until 1948, when it closed amid widespread school consolidations in the area. At one time, it was among 90 one-room school houses in Ford County — each of which was assigned a number, with the Miner Grade School being known as No. 61.
After the building was moved to Guthrie in 1954, it was used as the grain company’s office until the 1980s, when it was deemed no longer useful to the company and destroyed.
Before its move to Guthrie, though, it was indeed quite the useful building, serving for decades as not just a school house for kids in grades one through eight in Sullivant and Dix townships but also as a social gathering spot.
The Miner Grade School was located on 80 acres of land purchased in 1885 by John Mottes Miner. It replaced another school house — referred to as School House No. 4 — that had been at that same location for a short time before being destroyed by fire around 1880.
After John Mottes Miner’s death in 1922, the school house property remained in the family for three more decades. His daughter, Julia Miner Dueringer, purchased the school house property in the late 1940s. It had sentimental value to her, as it was where she met her future husband, Charles Dueringer, as both were attending school there decades earlier — in 1883.
After sitting unused for several years, she decided to sell the school house — but not the land it sat on — to the grain company in 1954.
Following her death, the school house property was inherited by her two daughters, Gladys Dueringer and Evelyn Dueringer, both of whom were employed as teachers in the area, with Gladys having started her career teaching at the Miner Grade School in 1923.
When Evelyn Dueringer died in 2003, it was inherited by her son, Bill Dueringer, and upon Bill Dueringer’s death in 2019, it was inherited by his daughter, Stephanie Dueringer Truscott, who still owns it today.
How the land — and one-time school house on it — ended up in the family is a history lesson in and of itself. John Mottes Miner bought the property after moving from his native Ohio to Ford County in the 1850s to assist his friend Michael Sullivant with his new farming operation there. Mr. Sullivant, also an Ohio native, had expanded his corn and livestock empire into Illinois and decided to bring John Mottes Miner along to help.
“Sullivant, he came into Illinois because land was cheap,” Tom Dueringer said. “You could probably pick it up for like 50 cents to a buck an acre, and he bought like 80,000 acres in Illinois.”
About 40,000 of the acres were in the Champaign area, while the other 40,000 were in Sullivant Township. Eventually, Sullivant “sold off the holdings in (the) Champaign (area) and then concentrated everything he had up here in (the) Sibley (area), and John Miner would become his brigadier,” Tom Dueringer said.
“Sullivant basically employed Miner to be his overseer, or foreman, (of the Sullivant Township farm),” Tom Dueringer said. “Today, we would call him a farm manager.”
At one time, the Sullivant Township farm employed some 600 workers.
After about 10 or 12 years, however, the farm took a financial hit and was divided up and sold. Most of the land went to one of Sullivant’s creditors, Hiram Sibley, but John Mottes Miner was able to buy the 1,260 acres of the land where School House No. 4 sat, plus 320 more acres adjacent to it.
Tom Dueringer estimated he put in about 1,500 hours researching the history of the property and school house, discovering some interesting facts about his great-grandfather in the process.
One fact that Tom Dueringer discovered was that his great-grandfather started the Guthrie State Bank. Also, Tom Dueringer learned that John Miner’s son-in-law, Charles Dueringer, served as the bank’s president until it was bought out by the Melvin bank in the late 1930s.
“I never knew that, and nobody else in my family knew that either,” Tom Dueringer said.
“But the most amazing thing about John Miner, to me, was that when he got here in the mid-1850s by helping Sullivant move all of his operation from Ohio to Illinois, he got to be really good friends with a lawyer named Abe Lincoln,” Tom Dueringer said. “John Miner would carriage the Abraham Lincoln around to all the different county seats to do his lawyer business. … And when (Lincoln) got on the train from Springfield to go to (Washington, D.C.) to be the 16th president, John Miner was there, and he was one of the last guys to shake his hand.”