The Thomas Select School is a historic log building in rural Butler County, Ohio, United States. Constructed in 1810, the building has seen numerous uses, ranging from church to school to house. It has been named a historic site.
Numerous log schoolhouses were built throughout early Ohio, but few have survived; the Thomas Select School is important partly because of its very existence.[2] Built in 1810,[1] the school was associated with a Welsh immigrant church in the small community of Shandon. In its early years, the Whitewater Congregational Church worshipped in both English and Welsh and supported two ministers; one of them, Thomas Thomas, also taught school in order to earn a living. Using their home as the schoolhouse, Thomas and his wife taught both girls and boys.[2] As the house was a parsonage, it remained in the church's ownership until 1885, when the trustees sold it to a family named Robinson, which owned the building until selling it in 1947. Since that time, it has been used as a summer house.[3]
Two stories tall, the school is a log cabin measuring 30 by 22 feet (9.1 m × 6.7 m), which makes it larger than most log schoolhouses of the period.[2] Since its early days, the building has been given an asphalt roof and various elements of stone.[4] Among its distinctive components is the presence of "steeple notches" in the logs:[2] these are V-shaped cuts made in the logs to enable them to fit together. Notches in log cabins are typically of other shapes, making the steeple notch rare and dateable; most log buildings in the eastern United States with this kind of notch were built before 1800.[5]
