- Education - Janesville Sesquicentennial
-
- Ghostbusting
- High school groundbreaking unearthed corpses
- Most schools have more auspicious beginnings than ghoulishly
disturbing the peace.
- But agitating ghosts was the mortifying fate of one of Janesville's
earliest high school buildings, later
- to be known as Jefferson School and first occupied by students
in May 1859.
- Initial site work went far deeper than "breaking ground":
Workers had to evacuate the village
- cemetery.
- The situation became grave when citizens discovered the corpses
had been unceremoniously
- unearthed and carted to Oak Hill, a recently purchased burial
ground.
- Mrs. M. L. BEERS gave this account: "Combine
certain elements in nature and an explosion
- follows. Antagonistic moral elements must have been assimilated
at this time, for a disturbance arose that sent a thrill of excitement
through the city. Laborers were hired by east side council men
to disinter the dead, and wagon loads of unknown anatomies in
miscellaneous heaps were carried across the city and again buried
to await in peace the last trumpet. This uncanny business, being
hastily done, was the match that ignited the fuse.
- "Injunctions were threatened and there was much wordy
warfare. But at length, wiser counsels
- prevailed and peace was established. And thus above the ashes
of the dead arose a commodious institution of learning, the alma
mater of many generations, the proud Acropolis of the tree-embowered
city below it."
- The high school was finally built at a cost of $29,750. The
three-story building, topped by a cupola,
- was considered "one of the most imposing and tasteful
structures of the city."
- The whole business shows that all things return from whence
they came. The cemetery has long
- been unearthed and the building was razed in 1947. May they
both rest in peace.
-
- [Photo of the Jefferson school building; caption reads: Early
Janesville High School was built in 1859 on former site of a
cemetery.]
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