4/28/1995 Daily Record
         
Lances' Gift Will Help Ring In The Past

By RUTH ANN LEATHERMAN
Rittman Staff Writer

RITTMAN - The past leaps out of its grave and forces us to remember we did not
come here on our own strength but stand on the foundations laid down by others.

Reunions this summer will cause many families to stop and remember those who 
came before.  Such is the case with the Lance family with its roots in Sterling
and Rittman.  

Christopher Lantz/Lance left his home in Jefferson County, Ohio, where he had 
lived since 1795 and brought his wife Sarah (Johnson) Lance to a section of 
Milton Township in the summer of 1814.  The 72-year-old Lance was scouting out 
a homeland on the Ohio frontier for some members of his large family of six sons
and five daughters.  In the next few years, five sons, James, William, Henry,
Abraham and John, followed their parents to the wilderness that was the 
Northwest Territory.

The brothers cleared farmland and built homes for their families in the area 
around the present Rittman and Shone roads.  With many children in the families,
a school house was needed.  James Lance donated land for a log school house.

The school, a blacksmith shop and a Baptist church of hewn logs were built near 
the farms.  The addition of a general store, cheese factory and other homes were
the beginnings of a settlement [known] as Lancetown.

Descendants of these early Milton Township pioneers to the eighth and ninth 
generations will celebrate their heritage and 200 years in the northwest 
territory with a Lance Family Reunion on Sunday, May 28, at locations near 
where their ancestors settled.

Mike Lance of Sterling is coordinating the reunion, which will include the 
presentation of one of the last artifacts remaining that marks the existence 
of the pioneer village of Lancetown.

Family members will gather at Historic Knupp Church in Rittman at noon for 
a family service inside the church building.  Matthew Lance will give a 
commemorative address.

After the 45-minute service the family will present a school bell from the 
third Lancetown School to the Rittman Historical Society.  Society co-presidents
Robert and Anita Frase will accept the bell on behalf of the society.

According to Mike Lance, the bell will remain in the possession of the society 
for display as long as there is a society.  The Lance family will retain 
ownership.  Certificates of shared ownership, suitable for display, will be 
available to the family.

After the ceremony, the family and former Lancetown School students will gather 
at Hartland Party Center, Sterling, for dinner and to relive memories through 
a display of family and local memorabilia.  The party center is located in the 
area of the Lancetown pioneer village.

"We're a nation of families," said Mike Lance, "When you research something 
like this reunion you find out how many families are intertwined."

A Lancetown School was in session for 110 years from 1827-1937.  The first log 
school at the crossroads in Lancetown was a subscription school and became 
a public school sometime after 1853.

The second schoolhouse was a frame structure located approximately halfway 
between Rittman and Zigler Road and was built sometime in the 1860s.  The third
and last Lancetown schoolhouse, built in 1877, was a brick structure located on 
the corner of Schorle and Zigler roads.

By 1926 the school had become Milton Township School Number 2, educating 23 
students.  In the summer of 1936 the state control board would not approve 
the school as an essential part of the state public school system.

Funds were not approved for distribution to the school.  The school board 
voted to permanently suspend the school.

After a lawsuit the court ordered the school reopened.  The board hired 
a teacher to teach on a daily basis until the school was closed in 1937.

During its operation, reunions of classmates were held frequently.  A report 
of a reunion in 1927 written by Ethel (Lance) Fritz for The Rittman Press 
records a story about the school bell.

Fritz wrote, "Someone is generally playing pranks at school.  There surely was 
one played on the teacher this day, for when she went to ring the bell, the bell
rope was drawn up to the ceiling, we had to contrive a way to get it down.  
Nothing (was) available in the school room."

"One of the early scholars of the day said, 'Wait a minute, I will find a way.'
So he, Freeman Lance, hiked out to the woods and with his jackknife cut a beech 
limb about 10 feet long, trimmed it up and left a hook on the end, brought it 
in the school house and it worked very accurately.  We soon set out the sweet
sound over vale and hill and called the scholars to school this day the same as 
in days past and gone."

A former teacher attending that 1927 reunion listed in the report was Edna Blough
of Marshallville.  Now 91 years old, Edna (Blough) Zimmerly lives on Pleasant 
Home Road near Sterling.

The school building sat abandoned for several years.  An attempt to restore the 
building as one of the few remaining examples of the "little red school house"
was abandoned after a fire in the building in 1967.

The Lancetown schoolhouse bell was purchased by the Lance Family at an auction 
in 1992.

With the coming of railroads, the population shifted from the pioneer area 
known as Lancetown to other communities.

The bell from the last school building will be mounted on a foundation stone 
from that building.  The stone was donated by Jim Shorle.  Custom stone sculptor
Michael Kraus of Creston prepared the stone for mounting the bell.

A bronze plaque on the foundation stone will be imprinted with a copy of the 
poem, "A Sharp School," by H.U. Johnson, a student at the Lancetown school 
during 1843-1844.  He later became a teacher and an examiner of the Ashtabula 
County Schools.

The poem was read at the 1916 Lancetown School reunion.  
The last four verses are:

    It stood upon a little hill, 
    was built of logs and shingles; 
    And here the youthful Buckeye blood.  
    With birch was often tingled.
 
    We stood in line to read and spell, 
    The Fosters, Johnsons, Kindigs; 
    The Aults and Weldays e're outdone, 
    In all our youthful "Shindigs".
 
    For there stood out a name supreme, 
    Heard at the roll call ever;
    Which told that sweet supremacy,
    Could crown the rest, no, never!
 
    The total call was sixty-three, 
    And this explains our chances; 
    Of that whole list of juveniles.  
    Just forty-two were Lances.

article provided by the 
WAYNE COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY GENEALOGY DEPARTMENT