This August 28, 1952, Lowell Tribune article and picture above appeared on page 15, column 1:
The first Cedar Creek township school was built on the Drake farm later purchased by Thomas Dickinson. The site lies south of Lowell on the east bank of Cedar Creek where the Earl Lappie residence now stands.
Richard Cannon, the first of the Cedar Creek schoolmasters is recalled in pioneer records as thorough in teaching and punishing as well. Cannon was a crippled man and taught but one term in this small hut of logs and pikes, and that before 1839. On this spot a larger school was built (Egypt school) where the children and grandchildren of this same Thomas Dickinson received their common-school training and where one daughter, Minerva; one daughter-in-law, Minnie Ebert Dickinson, and one grandson, Charles E. Dickinson, at widely separated intervals, taught for a number of years. School was discontinued there in the spring of 1927.
White men settled in the "Egypt" community in the early 1830's because of the soil's workability. Before the clay farms to the north of what is now Lowell were drained at all, a season in which there was a late spring or an early frost would spoil their crops, rendering the grain unfit for feed, seed or meal. The warmer, sandier, soil just above the Kankakee marshland never failed to mature corn. The farmers north of Lowell made many trips to the farms south of Lowell and one day a farmer jokingly said when asked where he was going, "I'm going to Egypt to buy corn." It became a common name which fastened itself to the community, even to this day.
Quote from the Lake County Souvenir issue of 1934, "Outstanding in the development of Lowell schools, if one man may be chosen, was H.H. Ragon, who came from Ohio in Civil War times. He taught for many years before assuming editorship of the Lowell Tribune."
Another version of the first Lake County school ran with this same picture in 1906.
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