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Union Academy

Chartered 1808.

Nine miles from Eatonton, near the famous Turner Plantation, stood Union Academy, a school of which the great William H Seward who afterwards became one of the most dramatic figures in American politics, was at one time principal.  (Mr Seward rose to be Governor of the State of New York, a representative of the same great commonwealth in the senate of the US and Secretary of State in the cabinet of President Lincoln.  It was only by the narrowest margin that the latter defeated him for the President in the contest of 1860.)

Alonzo Church became the headmaster of Union Academy and changed the name to Eatonton Academy in 1816.

It was on the Turner plantation that the famous Joel Chandler Harris began his literary career by setting type for the "Countryman" then the only newspaper in the world edited and published on a plantation.  According to local tradition, the site of Union Academy is today occupied by Phoenix School, which stands two or three hundred yards from the old printing office of the "Countryman".  The primitive wooden structure in which Mr Seward taught the young ideas of Georgia how to shoot was burned to the ground more than fifty years ago (1863) and the new building which rose in time from the ashes of the old one was not inappropriately called the Phoenix.

Eatonton Academy Library Society was organized by Alonzo Church, chartered in 1818.

Dr Adiel Sherwood, a noted pioneer educator and divine taught at the academy at Eatonton in the late 1820's.  He also instructed a small class in theology on a plantation near Eatonton, where he conducted the earliest manual of school of which there is any record in Georgia.

Eatonton Academies, male and female, located on Madison Avenue, ca 1884   Photo courtesy of Georgia's Virtual Vault.

Students and faculty of the Phoenix School, located ten miles east of Eatonton. Photo courtesy of Georgia's Virtual Vault.

The Rockville School, built in 1889 in Putnam Co, consolidated in 1890, graded in 1892.  Said to have been the first consolidated rural school and first vocational rural school in the state.   Photo courtesy of Georgia's Virtual Vault.

Rockville School, ca 1900-1905 Photo courtesy of Georgia's Virtual Vault

Rockville Academy, students and faculty, ca 1900-1910 Photo courtesy of Georgia's Virtual Vault

Central School pupils and teachers, Western Putnam Co, ca 1908 Photo courtesy of Georgia's Virtual Vault

Source: Georgia's Landmarks, Memorials and legends, by Lucian Lamar Knight, 1913, pages 862-863

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