52 Ancestors: #40 Squire Lot Green, Pioneer School Teacher

A schoolhouse similar to the one Lot Green would have taught in.

Lot Green was a farmer of Rush County all his active life. He was a man of fine attainments for those days and at different times taught school with such success that he is regarded as having been an able educator. For twenty years he was Justice of the Peace under the old constitution. (From the Pictorial and Biographical Memoirs of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana, 1893.)

My 4th great grandfather, Lot Green, conducted one of the oldest schools in Anderson Township, Rush County, Indiana. The log cabin school stood on the farm of Jacob Hackleman, one of the original settlers of Rush County.  In 1829, a man named George Wrinbro assumed the task of teaching the school. At the end of the school year, Mr. Wrinbro treated his students to whisky!  Another teacher in Anderson Township at the time was the famous evangelist and poet Knowles Shaw, who wrote the lyrics to the Gospel hymn "Bringing in the Sheaves."  

Lot was born on April 15, 1799 in Pulaski County, Kentucky, the tenth of eleven children. His parents were Thomas Greene and Elizabeth Ann Ransbird Mathews. (I believe Lot was the first Green in the family line to drop the final "e" from the surname.) Thomas Greene was a Patriot spy during the American Revolution and was the first cousin of General Nathanael Greene. Nathanael and Thomas Greene came from Quaker families, but both were turned out from the congregation because they would not acknowledge that they were wrong in joining the fight for freedom.

On April 27, 1824, Lot married Anna Cooper in Pulaski, Kentucky.  Together they had nine children. Anna died in 1841, when their youngest child was less than two years old.  Lot married Sarah Houston on June 7, 1842.  He was chosen as a delegate to attend the Rush County convention on April 18, 1843.

Lot's involvement in education had a lasting effect on his descendants.  Two of his sons, James Wilkinson Green and William Frame Green, became doctors.  Another son, John Cooper Green, was a well-known lawyer in Shelby County, Indiana.  His youngest son, Perry M. Green, was also a lawyer and a founder of the city of Pasadena, California.  Six of Lot's grandchildren became doctors, including my great grandfather, John D. Green.

Lot Green died on July 12, 1845 in Rush County, Indiana, at the age of 46.