Welcome to the Millbrook Township Historical Society's home page. We are a small group of volunteers, most of us farmers and retired farmers and schoolteachers and a few folks who moved out here from the city and got curious about the foundations in their back forty. We meet once a month, we keep the township's old records and photographs in two filing cabinets and a fireproof box at the township hall, and we throw one heck of a Heritage Day every September. This page was typed up by a member's grandson, who is home from college most weekends and has been very patient with us.

The first settlers came into what is now Millbrook Township in the mid-1830s, mostly families from Ohio and Pennsylvania who had heard there was good black soil to be had for a dollar and a quarter an acre from the government land office. They came by wagon, and the earliest of them wintered in a dugout on the creek bank before the first log cabin went up in the spring of 1835. The land was tallgrass prairie with timber along the creek, and the timber is why they settled where they did: you need wood for a cabin, a fence and a fire before you need anything else.

The township was formally organized in 1837, when there were enough families to hold a meeting, elect a clerk and a road supervisor, and levy a tax to build a bridge over the creek. The creek was called Mill Brook after the grist mill that went up on it a few years later, and the township took its name from the creek. By 1850 the census counted just over 400 people here; by 1880, when the railroad went through the north end, it was nearly 1,100, which is more than live here today.

The oldest building still standing in the township is a brick farmhouse from 1858 on the county road, still lived in by the same family's descendants. The township hall, where we meet, was built in 1889 and served as a polling place, a Grange hall and, for two winters in the 1930s, a soup kitchen.

At its height Millbrook Township had eight one-room schools, spaced so that no child had to walk more than about two miles: Pleasant Hill, Oak Grove, Stony Point, Center, Dutch Corners, Maple Ridge, Brook and Lone Elm. Each had one teacher, usually a young woman boarding with a nearby family, who taught all eight grades at once, kept the stove going, pumped the water and swept the floor. Older students helped the younger ones. Several of our members went to these schools and can still recite the poems they had to memorize.

The schools were consolidated in 1954, when the state pushed for larger districts and the new Millbrook Consolidated School opened with buses. The last one-room term was the spring of 1954 at Center School. Of the eight buildings, two survive: Oak Grove School is now the township road department's machine shed (the bell tower is gone but the cloakroom hooks are still on the wall), and Center School was moved to the fairgrounds in 1978 by the Society and restored. It is open on Heritage Day and by appointment, with the original desks, a pot-bellied stove, a set of 1920s readers and the flag with 48 stars.

We are collecting the memories of everyone who attended a Millbrook one-room school. If you or a parent did, please write to us; we have a list of questions and we'd love to sit down with you and a tape recorder.

The grist mill that gave the township its name was built in 1841 on Mill Brook, about a mile below the present bridge, by the Ashby family, who had run a mill back in Pennsylvania. It was a water-powered mill with an undershot wheel and two sets of stones, and for forty years every farmer within a day's drive brought his wheat and corn there to be ground, paying with a share of the flour. There was a store, a blacksmith and a few houses around it, and for a while the little settlement was the center of the township.

The railroad went through the north end of the township in 1880 and a steam-powered mill opened by the depot, and that was the beginning of the end for the old mill. It ground its last in 1911 and burned in 1922, most likely from a lightning strike. The dam washed out in the flood of 1937. Today the stone foundation and part of the millrace are still plainly visible from the creek, on private land; the owner allows the Society to bring visitors down on Heritage Day. One of the millstones sits in front of the township hall, and the other is under somebody's porch, and we know whose, and we're working on it.

There are five cemeteries in Millbrook Township: Oak Grove, Brook (by the old mill site), the Dutch Corners churchyard, Maple Ridge, and a small family plot on the Ashby farm with eleven stones. Old headstones weather, tip and get mowed over, and once a stone is gone, the name on it is gone. So in the spring of 1998 we started typing up every headstone in the township: name, dates, inscription, and where in the cemetery it stands.

The way we do it is low-tech. Two people walk the rows with a clipboard, one reading and one writing, and a third checks it a week later. Faint stones get a spray of water and a mirror to throw light across the letters. Then one of our members types it all into her computer at home, in WordPerfect, and prints out a copy for the filing cabinet and one for the county library.

Progress as of September 1999: Oak Grove is finished (312 stones, oldest 1839). Brook Cemetery is about half done (it's the hardest; a lot of the stones are limestone and badly weathered). Dutch Corners is next, in October, before the weather turns. If you'd like to help walk rows on a Saturday morning, bring a clipboard, kneepads and a thermos, and e-mail us the week before.

When the project is finished we hope to put the whole list on this page, so that people searching for their Millbrook ancestors can find them from anywhere. In the meantime, if you are looking for a particular name, write to us and we will look it up in what we have so far.

Our 22nd annual Heritage Day was held Saturday, September 11, 1999, at the fairgrounds, and it was a beautiful day, 74 degrees and not a cloud. We counted about 400 people through the gate, which is a record, and we ran out of parking, which has never happened before. Highlights:

• The antique tractor show drew 23 tractors, up from 16 last year. The oldest was a 1938 two-cylinder brought in on a trailer from the next county. The parade of tractors around the ring at 1:00 got the biggest crowd of the day. The tractor pull was won by a 1952 model with its original paint, and its owner would like it known that he did not touch the throttle.
• The pie contest had 31 entries this year. The blue ribbon went to a sour cream raisin pie, second to a peach, third to a rhubarb custard. The judges report that they are still full. All 31 pies were then sold by the slice and raised $186 for the Center School restoration fund.
• Center School was open all day with a retired teacher holding "class" on the hour: penmanship, a spelling bee and a lesson from a 1920s reader. The children found the outhouse fascinating.
• The quilt display in the exhibit hall showed 40 quilts, the oldest an 1870s signature quilt with names of township families stitched into every block; we are cross-checking those names against the cemetery lists.
• The mill walk at 3:00 took about 30 people down to the old mill foundation. Wear boots next year.

Thank you to everyone who baked, drove, set up tables, made coffee and took down tables. Heritage Day 2000 will be Saturday, September 9, 2000. Put it on the calendar.

Last winter the Society was given a shoebox of about forty old photographs from an estate sale, most of them from about 1900 to 1930, and very few of them labeled. We would dearly love to put them on this page so that people could help us put names to faces, but we do not have a scanner, and nobody in the Society owns one. If you have a scanner and would be willing to spend an afternoon with us and a shoebox, please get in touch. In the meantime, here is what some of them show, in case a description rings a bell:

• A threshing crew, about 1915: fourteen men and boys in front of a steam engine and separator, with a water wagon. Someone has written "Maple Ridge" on the back in pencil.
• A one-room school class of about 25 children on the steps of a white frame school, with the teacher at the side. We think it is Pleasant Hill, around 1910, because of the double front doors.
• A wedding portrait, studio-made, of a young couple; the cardboard mount says the photographer was in the county seat. Around 1905.
• A family of eight in front of a two-story farmhouse with a windmill, with a dog. The house looks like the one on the Dutch Corners road that burned in the 1940s.
• Several snapshots of a ball team in uniforms that say "MILLBROOK" across the front, 1920s. We have never heard of a township ball team and would love to know more.
• A Fourth of July picnic at the mill, with the wheel still standing in the background, so before 1922.

The originals are at the township hall and may be viewed at any meeting.

The Society meets on the third Thursday of every month at 7:00 p.m. at the township hall (no meeting in December; we have a potluck instead). Coming up: October 21 (program: the 1937 flood, with a member's home movies) and November 18 (program: the cemetery project report and planning for Heritage Day 2000). Visitors are always welcome and coffee is always on.

Dues are $10 a year for an individual and $15 for a family, and that gets you our quarterly newsletter, The Millstone, four pages of township history, member news and old recipes, plus a vote at the annual meeting in January. Dues go toward the Center School fund, copying costs and the fireproof box. To join, come to a meeting or send your name and mailing address to [email protected] and we'll mail you a form.

We are also always looking for donations of township-related items: photographs, letters, school records, plat maps, church programs, anything with a name and a date on it. Please don't throw Grandma's box away without calling us first.