A big rock and a walk in the woods

Editor’s note: This is the sixth in The Commercial Review’s series featuring the everyday sights, sounds, places and personalities of Jay County and the surrounding area.
Alumni of Jay County’s historic high schools — Gov. I.P. Gray, Redkey, Poling, Dunkirk, Bryant, Madison, Pennville and Portland — have done their best to memorialize their sites.
But it’s likely that none of the monuments to those pre-consolidation high schools is larger than the boulder to be found at county roads 600 South and 700 East.
And none of the other schools is now a nature preserve.
Madison High School, which opened its doors in 1923 and graduated its last class in 1967, was built on 27 acres that had been the site of a log cabin school in 1854. The land continued to be home to schools for more than a century.
Harold Brubaker was the first principal of the 1923 school and served in that role for 17 years before being named principal of Portland High School.
Like most of the pre-consolidation school buildings, Madison was razed in the 1970s.
But in 1994 the 27-acre site was purchased by a Madison alum, the late Louis A. “Sam” Bibler, who donated it to ACRES Land Trust as the Madison Township School Nature Preserve.
In 1995, a group of Madison alumni, led by the late Ralph May, placed a huge boulder on the site, inscribing it with a wealth of permanent historical information about Madison Township schools.
ACRES maintains a short, looping trail at the site through the secondary growth of sugar maple, ash, oak and hickory. It is open to the public and is easy hiking for families with small children. There are a number of ACRES-built bluebird houses at the preserve.
Bibler, who had a successful career as a geologist working in the petroleum industry, and his brother Paul R. Bibler also donated a 105-acre nature preserve to ACRES in 1992. The Bibler Preserve, located on county road 400 East north of Treaty Line Road in Pike Township had been part of their family homestead, known as Spring Brook Farm.
That preserve has two miles of looping trails through woods, farm fields, and along a rocky stream. The woods has beech, oak, hickory, and maple and there are large stands of twinleaf and Solomon’s seal wildflowers.
There is limited parking at both nature preserves.[[In-content Ad]]