"Let There Be Light"
South Whitley, Whitley County, Indiana
Marker Inscription
During the year 1837 in a log cabin near this spot David Parrett taught the First School in Whitley County.
The Story
In 1837, when Whitley County was still raw frontier, a schoolmaster named David Parrett gathered the area's first pupils in a log cabin near this spot. Learning in those days meant a single room, a wood stove, and whatever books families could spare — yet the founding of a first school was a milestone every young settlement prized. The marker's motto, "Let There Be Light," captures how pioneers saw education as the dawn of civilization on the frontier.
Why it matters
It commemorates the grassroots beginnings of public education in the American interior, where a log-cabin school was often a community's first act of permanence.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1837, the part of northern Indiana that became Whitley County was still very new country. Indiana had been a state for only about two decades, and this stretch of the interior was among the last to be surveyed, sold, and settled. Families arriving here found dense woods, few roads worth the name, and neighbors measured in miles rather than yards.
The work of those first years was relentlessly physical: clearing timber, raising cabins, breaking ground for the first crops. A settlement's earliest buildings were almost always practical ones — a cabin, a barn, perhaps a mill. That a community this raw would set aside a log cabin for teaching says a great deal about what these settlers wanted their new home to become.
Schooling on the frontier in this era rarely came from the state. Long before Indiana built its free public system, learning was a local, do-it-yourself affair: parents pooled what they could, a literate neighbor agreed to teach, and lessons happened in whatever building was available. A first school was less an institution than a promise that the settlement intended to last.
People & events
The marker fixes a single, human moment: in 1837, a man named David Parrett gathered the county's first pupils in a log cabin near this spot and taught. That is the whole of the record it preserves, and it is enough.
Picture what that classroom likely was. A one-room cabin heated by a wood fire. Children of different ages on rough benches, sharing whatever books their families could spare. A teacher who was probably a farmer or tradesman as much as a scholar, passing on reading, figuring, and penmanship to whoever could be spared from chores.
We don't need to embellish Parrett's story to feel its weight. Being the first to teach in a county means every school that followed traces back, in a sense, to that cabin — and to the decision of a frontier community that its children should learn even before the stumps were out of the fields.
Its place in the American story
This little cabin school is a piece of a much larger American pattern. As settlement pushed across the interior in the early nineteenth century, communities again and again treated a school as one of their first acts of permanence — proof that they meant to build a society, not just a clearing.
The marker's motto, borrowed from the language of scripture, captures how deeply that generation linked learning with light and progress. To pioneers, a school was civilization's dawn on ground that had known none of its institutions.
Decades before free, tax-supported public education became the norm, it was grassroots efforts like this one — a willing teacher, a borrowed building, a handful of families — that carried literacy into the American interior. The story of the nation's schools is written first in places exactly like this.
If you visit
Don't come expecting a grand building. The value here is in imagination: you are standing where a county's very first classroom once stood, in country that in 1837 was still frontier. Let the modest scale of the spot do its work.
Look at the land around you and try to strip away the modern surface — the paved roads, the fields long since cleared. Picture instead the timber, the isolation, and a single log cabin where children came to learn their letters.
It makes a fine, quiet stop on a drive through this part of Indiana, especially paired with a visit to the county seat or a local historical society, where you can learn how the community that started in that cabin grew. Give yourself a minute to appreciate that education here began not with a mandate from above, but with neighbors who simply decided their children deserved it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · David Parrett
Themes & tags
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