Helmsburg Golden Rule Days
~ by Julia Pearson
In the 1850s a small community of family farms populated Jackson Township. With the railroad coming through in 1906, a fullfledged village sprang up. For many passengers disembarking at the station and met by horse-drawn hacks owned by Arthur Helms and Joshua Bond, Helmsburg was the gateway to Brown County. Like most communities, the local post office and school provided the glue that kept folks together after major businesses disappeared with passing years. Until consolidation, students could enter first grade and twelve years later receive their high school diplomas in Helmsburg.
First person narratives of this era in the village’ s history are part of a collection published for the Brown County Sesquicentennial in 1986 entitled Brown County Remembers. Newton Walker, a trustee of Jackson Township, built the Helmsburg school“ near the year 1908.” It had one room for the lower grades and another room for high school. A south wing
62 Our Brown County July / August 2017
was added in 1913. Fred Bay, a trustee, built a gymnasium east of Helmsburg High School in 1934. It was later lost in a fire.
Children were able workers in the family gardens and fields, harvesting vegetables and fruits that were canned for winter meals, and butchering hogs in the fall when days and nights were cooler. Walking several miles to and from school was not too difficult till winter storms
Helmsburg 1923. Frank M. Hohenberger, courtesy The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Helmsburg High School in 1911 and first graduating class of 1915. George R. Fleener is third from the left in the middle row.
brought drifting snow to contend with. Tin lunch pails held fried pies of dried apples and peaches and ham sandwiches for midday hunger.
Betty Hathaway Sanders Browne recounted the Saturday night baths in the washtub in the living room behind the wood stove. Her brother, Bud, who had a Model-T Ford, was popular with his classmates during the sub-zero temperatures of winter evenings and could get them all to basketball games and other activities. Everyone gladly pitched in gas money.
During the 1918 flu epidemic, all Brown County schools were closed for four weeks. During this time, Roxie Kaserman Cullum and her sister, Bessie, were sent to stay with relatives in Bloomington where she worked in a furniture factory. She recalls wearing white masks over their noses while she sanded the furniture. They returned home when the school reopened.