SMITHVILLE -- Professor J. B. Eberly's dream of a Smithville High School became a reality on July 30, 1867.
The new brick building, erected at a cost of some $8,000, was 50-by-100 feet, with three rooms on the first floor and a large auditorium complete with a stage and curtain on the second. The entrance was in the center of the east facade and led into an entrance hall that led back to the principal recitation room where Eberly conducted recitations in grammar, analysis and such other classes that usually enrolled large numbers of students.
The activities of the school impacted all aspects of the community. Literary societies were established, debating clubs organized and a musical department was created.
Between 1865 and 1885, more than 5,000 students were educated in Smithville Normal School, with the average length of time spent in the school being three terms -- or one full year -- per student. The average expenditure for an education there was $100 per year, and the value of the school to the village at that time was set in excess of $500,000.
Over the years, however, support for the school began to erode and became a financial embarrassment for Eberly, stemming from a mortgage on the building that resulted when original subscribers did not pay promised pledges, which ultimately resulted in insolvency.
In 1885, Eberly transferred the school from Smithville to Wadsworth where it became the Western Reserve Normal College, an institution he conducted for seven years along lines similar to what he had done at Smithville High School.
In a tribute written to Eberly in his 1878 history of Wayne County, when the professor was at the zenith of his popularity and work in Wayne County, Ben Douglass wrote, "He recognizes the central and seminal fact that the county asks for scholars, not scholastics; practical men, not perambulating abstractions; men whose minds have been strengthened, not overwhelmed by learning. He has an agile, quick, mechanical mind, loves order because he was born to love it, and out of the harmonious play of his faculties springs the government of the schoolroom.
"His mind is intuitive, grasping, productive, re-productive; he sees an idea, comprehends it, then pounces on it like a falcon, when he forever holds it. He has, moreover, the capacity of not simply understanding things, but of making others understand them. He is a thinker and a worker. There is no emotion or gush about him. His mind moves in a region of realities, facts, figures and objects.
"In conversation he is fluent, elastic and sarcastic. As a public speaker he ascends to the regions of thought, divesting himself of all badinage and the gallantry of declamation. He is one of the foremost educators in Wayne County."
Sources: "Smithville Days" by James L. Orr and "History of Wayne County, Ohio" by Ben Douglass
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Reporter Paul Locher can be reached at 330-682-2055 or firstname.lastname@example.org.