Surrounded by wilderness, Andrew and the other students sat in a drafty stone building reciting Latin and Greek. But when the time came for planting and harvesting, classes ended, and the students returned to their family farms. Life in 1822 Darlington, then called Greersburg, consisted of hard work, prayer and, if you had money or valuables, a chance to attend school. Sixteen years before Andrew Chatly began classes there, Greersburg Academy opened its doors to young men interested in an education decades before the advent of public schools. They learned for two years at the academy and later became ministers, lawyers, doctors, educators and even governor.
Legend has it that one student went on to die in a rebellion against slavery.
And while nearly 200 years have passed, the story of their school, their lives and their era is still being told. The stories are in the collections of an ancestor, the research of a historian and the words of one of their own. Larry Mahon, the president of the Little Beaver Historical Society since 1986, serves as a link to the happenings in a building that is the oldest standing in Beaver County. The Rev. Thomas E. Hughes petitioned the Erie Presbytery to build the school and asked for donations. Mahon said Abner Lacock, who later became Beaver County's first United States senator, helped secure the state subsidy for the academy.