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The Urban Frontier in Pioneer Indiana ROBERT G The Urban Frontier in Pioneer Indiana ROBERT G. BARROWS AND LEIGH DARBEE ne of the central themes of Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier— Othat the “growth of urbanism was an important part of the occupa- tion of the West”—has been reflected in Indiana historiography only occasionally. Donald F. Carmony’s examination of the state from 1816 to mid-century is definitive on constitutional, financial, political, and transportation topics, but is much less informative concerning social and urban history; indeed, Wade’s book does not appear in Carmony’s bibliography. In his one-volume history of the state, The Indiana Way, James H. Madison echoes Wade when he writes: “Towns were an essen- tial part of frontier development . providing essential services to the rural and agricultural majority of Indiana’s population.”1 When one con- siders the history of cities and towns in pioneer Indiana in relation to Wade’s classic work, a “generation gap” becomes readily apparent. Developments in Indiana (and, notably, in Indianapolis, the closest comparison to the cities Wade examined) run two or three decades behind his discussion of urbanism in the Ohio Valley. Wade begins his __________________________ Robert G. Barrows is chair of the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and co-editor, with David Bodenhamer, of The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (1994). Leigh Darbee is executive assistant at the Indiana Rail Road Company, Indianapolis, and the author of A Guide to Early Imprints at the Indiana Historical Society, 1619- 1840 (2001). 1Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 2; Donald F. Carmony, Indiana, 1816-1850: The Pioneer Era (Indianapolis, 1998); James H. Madison, The Indiana Way: A State History (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 93. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (September 2009) ᭧ 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. INDIANAPOLIS 263 book in 1790 (ten years prior to the creation of Indiana Territory) and concludes his Part I in 1815, one year before Indiana became a state. He ends his narrative in 1830, at which point Indiana’s new capital city was less than a decade old. In that year Cincinnati had a population of almost 25,000 and Louisville claimed approximately 10,000—and both were situated on a major transportation corridor.2 Indianapolis, with at most 1,900 residents and probably several hundred fewer, remained at the time an “isolated outpost, poorly connected with the settled portions of the state.”3 Even the state’s largest cities were much smaller than the communities Wade examined. Indeed, in simple numerical terms, when Indiana joined the Union in 1816 the state scarcely had an urban com- ponent at all. To be sure, several extant towns—Vincennes, Corydon, Madison—played important roles in the state’s early political and eco- nomic life, but these were still very small places in 1816, well below the threshold of 2,500 residents necessary today to be classified as an “urban place” in the census. The situation did not change much during the first twenty-five years of statehood. There were many new towns established in the after- math of the New Purchase of 1818, as migrants began to surge north- ward from the Ohio River and new counties (requiring county seats) were created. But in both 1820 and 1830 less than 1 percent of Indiana’s residents could be classified as urban, even if the technical definition is abandoned. Geographer Stephen Visher, an early student of the state’s nascent urban network, observed that “there were few towns in much of south central and central Indiana until after 1825, and few in northern Indiana until after 1840.”4 By 1840 a mere 1.6 percent of Hoosiers lived __________________________ 2Wade, The Urban Frontier, 195, 198. 3Carmony, Indiana, 1816-1850, 111. There are no official or even generally accepted population figures for Indianapolis prior to 1840. The figure of 1,900 residents in the capital in 1830 is an admitted estimate in The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. Dunn reports a total population of 1,066 in 1827 (based on a census taken by Sunday school visitors) and 1,683 in 1835 (based on a count conducted by the town’s assessor). Barnhart and Carmony cite the Indiana Journal (Indianapolis), which reported in October 1830 that the capital had 1,094 residents. See David Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, eds., The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 1504; Jacob Piatt Dunn, Greater Indianapolis: The History, the Industries, the Institutions, and the People of a City of Homes (2 vols., Chicago, 1910), 1: 94, 99; and John D. Barnhart and Donald F. Carmony, Indiana: From Frontier to Industrial Commonwealth (4 vols., New York, 1954), 1: 418. 4Stephen S. Visher, “The Location of Indiana Towns and Cities,” Indiana Magazine of History, 51 (December 1955), 341n. 264 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY in places reporting 2,500 or more inhabitants. If the census criterion is applied, then just three cities accounted for the state’s entire urban pop- ulation: New Albany (4,226), Madison (3,798), and Indianapolis (2,692). “That Indiana was a rural state in 1840 can scarcely be doubt- ed,” observe two well-known historians, “but the lack of urban centers may not be fully realized.”5 Population statistics, however, do not tell the whole story. The cities, towns, and villages of Indiana’s pioneer era had an importance belied by their modest size. These “wedge[s] of urbanism . driven into the backwoods” served critical economic, governmental, and social functions, and did in fact provide “the central experience of many set- tlers.” R. Carlyle Buley argued that life in the villages and country towns of the Old Northwest “differed but little” from life in the surrounding countryside. Perhaps—but it did differ.6 Why did towns and cities develop in certain places and not in oth- ers? And why did some urban areas grow while others stagnated? The location of Indiana towns depended on many factors, the combination and importance of which differed from place to place and over time. Although no listing of such factors can purport to be all-inclusive, Carmony and John D. Barnhart offered a useful compilation: “county seat selections, the Indian trading places, spots where land or water traf- fic and trade crossed, the clustering of shops or stores around grist and saw mills, the boosting and gifts of speculators and promoters, sites where boats were loaded or goods exported, and the impetus which came from the location of general stores.”7 Entrepreneurial functions should perhaps be emphasized, since the initial raison d’etre for most towns was essentially economic. Wade’s description of western towns as the “commercial nerve centers of the frontier” seems applicable to Indiana (although, as will be seen, less so to early Indianapolis than might be expected). As Francis P. Weisenburger observed in his pioneering study of midwestern urbanization, published more than a decade before The Urban Frontier, “little villages in the forest arose almost with the cultivation of the first farms, in order to take care of __________________________ 5Barnhart and Carmony, Indiana, 1: 179. 6Wade, The Urban Frontier, 35, 2; R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815- 1840 (2 vols., Indianapolis, 1950), 1: 235. 7Barnhart and Carmony, Indiana, 1: 418. INDIANAPOLIS 265 necessary demands of the countryside. Similarly, larger communities developed as interior market towns for a considerable area.”8 The enterprise of town promoters must also be acknowledged. Land speculation was a widespread and important activity throughout the nineteenth century, and “town jobbing” was merely a specialized form of the art. As Buley observes: “The turnover, if any, was relatively quick and profitable; since little capital was required almost anyone could try his hand at it.” By the late 1820s and early 1830s, town sites were being promoted in central and northern Indiana, and newspapers carried advertisements for the sale of lots in Anderson, Knightstown, Muncie, Delphi, Marion, Lebanon, South Bend, and LaPorte. Some spec- ulative ventures, such as those just mentioned, were successful. Numerous others, both in Indiana and across the Midwest, were not, prompting a Chicago editor to comment in 1835: “Each town has its day and each day has its town.”9 Speculating on the success or decline of antebellum towns, urban geographer Allen Pred has focused on “geographical expressions of ini- tial advantage”—primarily desirability of location and degree of access to transportation networks.10 These factors were not static, and some notable Indiana examples support the observation that “variations in the performance of these towns over the years indicated that . the diffi- culties of adjusting to the changing conditions of regional development must have been severe.”11 In pioneer-era Indiana, the Ohio, lower Wabash, and Whitewater Rivers were major routes of travel and trade and produced what Buley termed a “crescent of settlement.”12 Visher notes that “villages and towns were located on their banks at points having some local advantage, such as higher, better-drained land, or the presence of a tributary valley.” Some three dozen Indiana towns had been established on the Ohio River by 1830, including New Albany and Madison, then the state’s two __________________________ 8Wade, The Urban Frontier, 42; Francis P. Weisenburger, “The Urbanization of the Middle West: Town and Village in the Pioneer Period,” Indiana Magazine of History, 41 (March 1945), 21. 9Buley, Old Northwest, 2: 147, 53. 10Allan Pred, “Industrialization, Initial Advantage, and American Metropolitan Growth,” Geographical Review, 55 (April 1965), 173. 11Edward K. Muller, “Selective Urban Growth in the Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860,” Geographical Review, 66 (April 1976), 178. 12Buley, Old Northwest, 1:26. 266 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY “View of the City of Madison, Indiana.” The river towns of Madison and New Albany were, for at least two decades, more populated and prosperous than the state capital in Indianapolis.
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