| 1899 | Classes begin at Northern Illinois State Normal School on September 12, 1899. |
| 1900 | The Milan Township District #83 schoolhouse is built. |
| 1904 | The first consolidated school in Illinois is opened in Winnebago County on February 1, 1904. Consolidated schools pooled children from several one-room schools into single, multi-classroom schools like today’s. |
| 1908 | 307,111 children attend school in the 10,638 one-room schoolhouses of Illinois.President Theodore Roosevelt forms the National Commission on Country Life to find some solutions for “rural problems,” including looking into the consolidation of schools. |
| 1913 | Half of the school children in the United States are enrolled in the country’s 212,000 one-room schools.32% of the teachers of Illinois have two or more years of training beyond high school graduation. |
| 1918 | There are more than 90,000 one-room schoolhouses in the Midwest. |
| 1919 | A federal report notes that about 200,000 one-teacher, country schools provide the only means of education for the large majority of rural children in the United States. |
| 1921 | Northern Illinois State Normal School becomes Northern Illinois State Teacher’s College. |
| 1925 | About one-half of the elementary school children in Illinois outside of Cook County are enrolled in one-room schools.DeKalb County has 154 school districts. |
| 1929 | Homer Hall is appointed as director of the Rural Education program that trains teachers for one-room schools at Northern Illinois State Teacher’s College. |
| 1931 | The total enrollment at Northern Illinois State Teacher’s College is 850 students.The State of Illinois estimated that 1750 teachers are needed annually to fill the vacancies in the state’s one-room schools. |
| 1932 | 72% of the teachers of Illinois have two or more years of training beyond high school graduation. |
| 1938 | By this year, more than 19,000 one-room schools have been abandoned near urban areas throughout the Midwest. |
| 1942 | The Milan Township District #83 Schoolhouse closes its doors. |
| 1945 | There are 12,090 school districts in Illinois. 9,405 are one-teacher districts and classified as rural. 4,100 of these have less than 10 students at this time. 548 school districts have less than 5 students at this time. |
| 1947 | 1,500,000 students in the United States are still served by one-room schools, even though half of them had closed by 1917. |
| 1950 | A federal report notes that the number of one-room schools is steadily decreasing as farms grow larger and more mechanized and the population shifts from rural areas to urban areas.By 1950, a total of thirty-six state teacher’s colleges nationwide had become state colleges: Fourteen of these converted between 1946 and 1950. |
| 1955 | Most state teacher’s colleges have changed to state colleges.Northern Illinois State Teacher’s College becomes Northern Illinois State College. |
| 1956 | Northern Illinois State College becomes Northern Illinois University. |
| 1994 | Wayne and Mary McIlrath donate the Milan Township District #83 Schoolhouse to the Blackwell History of Education Museum located at Northern Illinois University. |
| 1999 | The Milan Township District #83 Schoolhouse is reconstructed on the campus of Northern Illinois University. |