The Urban Frontier in Pioneer Indiana ROBERT G

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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 essential 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 economic 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 population: 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 settlers.” 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 others? 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 traffic 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 initial 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. Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion (New York, 1854), courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society

largest.13 Ten years later, over four-fifths of the state’s residents lived in the southern half of the state, and one-half of those lived within seventy- five miles of the Ohio River.14 Victor M. Bogle attributes much of New Albany’s population growth and economic expansion in the antebellum years to its riverine access, noting that the city’s “location at a key point on the Ohio was an enviable one in a period when the river counted for so much.”15 The importance of ready access to the major river systems is underscored by the location of county seats. Ten of the thirteen Indiana counties that touch the Ohio River have county seats situated on the river rather than in the interior. And of the fourteen counties touched by the Wabash, ten have their seat of government adjacent to the river.16

______13Visher, “Location of Indiana Towns and Cities,” 341-42. 14Roger H. Van Bolt, “The Indiana Scene in the 1840’s,” Indiana Magazine of History, 47 (December 1951), 333. 15Victor M. Bogle, “New Albany: Mid-Nineteenth Century Economic Expansion,” Indiana Magazine of History, 53 (June 1957), 145. 16Thomas Frank Barton, “Indiana’s Hierarchy of Numerically Primate Cities: An Extension of the Jefferson Hypothesis,” Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of the Social Sciences (1971), 58. INDIANAPOLIS 267

The construction of canals—artificial rivers—during the 1830s and 1840s spurred the development of cities located along their routes. The Wabash and Erie Canal encouraged economic activity in Fort Wayne, Peru, Logansport, Lafayette, Terre Haute, and Evansville; while the Whitewater Canal prompted the growth of towns and cities in the east-central portion of the state. But the canals were merely extensions of a water-based transportation system and were intended to provide more dependable access to the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.17 One other item, sometimes overlooked, should be included in any discussion of “initial advantages.” The governmental functions assumed by some cities and towns usually gave them an edge with respect to long-term growth. Designation as a county seat (or, as we shall see, the state capital) automatically added a flourishing “industry” to the community. Competition for this honor was intense, leading one writer to document what he called the “county seat wars” in Indiana.18 Such fer- vor was not misplaced; in many cases the community designated as the seat of government went on to become the largest town in the county. In 1970 over two-thirds of the state’s county seats (64 of 92) were at least two times larger than the next largest town in the same county.19 Wade’s enduring image of pioneer cities as “spearheads . . . planted far in advance of the line of settlement” is reflected in Indiana by two towns, already mentioned, whose location gave them a significant “initial advantage.”20 Madison, situated 86 miles below Cincinnati and 43 miles above Louisville, was founded in 1811 and sited “in one of the most northerly bends of the Ohio.” Thus, in the words of an early western traveler, it presented “one of the nearest points of Ohio [River] nav- igation to that extensive body of rich land, at and around the Delaware towns [in central Indiana], which yet remain uncultivated.”21 Many immigrants to Indiana disembarked at Madison, especially after the New

______17Edwin Maldonado, “Urban Growth During the Canal Era: The Case of Indiana,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly, 31 (Winter 1978-79), 20-37. 18Ernest V. Shockley, “County Seats and County Seat Wars in Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, 10 (March 1914), 1-46. 19Barton, “Indiana’s Hierarchy of Numerically Primate Cities,” 56. 20Wade, The Urban Frontier, 1. 21Edmund Dana, Geographical Sketches on the Western Country (Cincinnati, 1819), 118-19, as quoted in Donald T. Zimmer, “Madison, Indiana, 1811-1860: A Study in the Process of City Building” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1974), 74. 268 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Purchase of 1818, and “service to these immigrants while they established themselves on the virgin land, was the hamlet’s concern.” By about 1820 Madison had established a sizable “tributary area from which it drew surplus produce for processing and marketing and for which it provided manufactured goods.”22 Madison was, of course, much smaller than either Cincinnati or Louisville, with a population in 1820 of perhaps 900 and only about 8,000 by 1850.23 But had Wade elected to examine communities on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, he might have identified in Madison characteristics that supported his thesis that towns were the “spearheads” of the frontier. So, too, with New Albany, located across the river from Louisville. The town was situated at the lower end of the Falls of the Ohio, a shal- low, rocky stretch of the river that was a transportation break point. As the community’s principal historian observed, migrants “came down the Ohio River as far as practicable, then branched off at some convenient point to continue the journey by land. The Falls made New Albany one of these convenient points.”24 Although much smaller than Louisville, by about 1830 the town “did possess important commercial advantages” including “its growing role as a trade mart for a large agricultural section of southern Indiana.”25 At least into the 1830s, New Albany’s general stores “provided the townspeople and their rural neighbors many of their daily needs”—from tea and coffee to plows and axes. Store inven- tories “attest to the variety of foodstuffs, beverages, luxury items, and general conveniences available to New Albany purchasers.”26 So while communities like Madison and New Albany were obviously overshad- owed by Cincinnati and Louisville, they nonetheless serve as examples of Wade’s claim that “the central nexus of the urbanization of the West was commerce.”27 But what of Indianapolis, the state’s capital and, by 1860, its largest city? In the half-century since publication of The Urban Frontier, the rel-

______22Zimmer, “Madison, Indiana,” 46, 74. 23Ibid., 74, 54. 24Victor M. Bogle, “New Albany: Reaching for the Hinterland,” Indiana Magazine of History, 50 (June 1954), 157. 25Victor M. Bogle, “New Albany Within the Shadow of Louisville,” Indiana Magazine of History, 51 (December 1955), 303. 26Bogle, “New Albany: Mid-Nineteenth Century Economic Expansion,” 130. 27Wade, The Urban Frontier, 66. INDIANAPOLIS 269

The selection of the site of Indianapolis in 1820. The city was designed as a center of government, not of commerce or merchandise. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 26, 1874, courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society atively few historians who have written about antebellum Indianapolis have not applied Wade’s thesis to their examinations of the city’s early development. James Madison’s work on the business community of early Indianapolis does not examine the pre-Civil War capital in the context of Wade’s observations. Neither does Edward A. Leary’s popular account Indianapolis: The Story of a City (1971), published on the occasion of the community’s sesquicentennial, nor George W. Geib’s heavily illustrated Indianapolis: Hoosiers’ Circle City (1981). This seeming omission may well be entirely appropriate, however, since Wade’s thesis appears to be less applicable to Indianapolis than to the river towns he examined or to other Indiana locales such as those discussed above.28

______28James H. Madison, “Businessmen and the Business Community in Indianapolis, 1820-1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1972); Edward A. Leary, Indianapolis: The Story of a City (Indianapolis, 1971); George W. Geib, Indianapolis: Hoosiers’ Circle City (Tulsa, Okla., 1981). 270 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Unlike the cities Wade examined, as well as towns like New Albany and Madison that grew from their natural physical advantages, Indianapolis was created by politicians to serve a governmental func- tion. As historian Jon Teaford observes, “from selection to sale . . . Indianapolis was a state creation molded by the public sector.”29 This fact retarded the city’s commercial and industrial growth, and it was only a significant technological innovation—the railroad—that turned Indianapolis from a provincial town focused primarily on its governmental role to a major economic hub in the Midwest. Carl Abbott, reviewing a reprint edition of Wade’s Urban Frontier, remarks that “[i]n Wade’s Old Northwest we find no gradual coalescence of rural subsis- tence society into a more complex economy.”30 In many ways, however, this is precisely how Indianapolis did develop, struggling through almost three decades of sluggish growth before flourishing in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the iconic stories in Indiana history is that of the commissioners setting out into the wilderness in 1820 to find a centrally located site for the new state capital, as mandated by the General Assembly in order to fulfill the provision in the 1816 state constitution that Corydon would remain the seat of government only until 1825. Their charge was straightforward:

The said commissioners or a majority of them shall meet at the site above named on the first Monday in April next or as soon thereafter as they conveniently can and shall proceed to lay out a town on such part of the land selected and hereby established as the seat of government as they may deem most proper, and on such plan as they may conceive will be advantageous to the state and to the prosperity of said town having specially in view the health, utility and beauty of the place.31

______29Frederick D. Kershner Jr., “From Country Town to Industrial City: The Urban Pattern in Indianapolis,” Indiana Magazine of History, 45 (December 1949), 327-28; Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 28. 30Carl Abbott, “Review of Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790- 1830,” H-Urban, H-Net Reviews, April 1997 http://www. h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev. cgi?path=22538869853460. 31Indiana Constitution (1816), Art. XI, Sec. 11; Laws of Indiana (1820-21), 45. INDIANAPOLIS 271

The principal requirement for the site of the new capital was its geographic proximity to the center of the state. Three places were considered, all of which had the primary advantage of location: the Bluffs, near present-day Waverly; William Conner’s farm, near what is now Noblesville; and the confluence of Fall Creek and White River. The last of these was chosen because it was nearest the center of the state; because it provided the best location for landing boats of all the sites considered; and because Fall Creek was highly suitable for mills. (The mills would thus be to the east of White River, the east side of which was the better landing bank.)32 Several of these factors were based on the commissioners’ mistaken belief that the White River was, or could easily be made, navigable. This was an error that significantly compromised the “initial advantage” the location was expected to enjoy, and it made the capital’s early development markedly different from that of the river cities discussed by Wade. Historians have argued back and forth about whether the McCormicks or the Pogues were the first to settle in what would become the capital, but the fact is that they, and perhaps ten other families, had settled on the east bank of White River by the summer of 1820—about the time of the commissioners’ visit—with the cluster of cabins coming to be known as the Fall Creek settlement.33 As word of the location of the new capital spread, an estimated additional 200 settlers arrived during the next year or so. Simultaneously, Alexander Ralston developed his dis- tinctive plat for the town, leaving many early cabins standing in the middle of planned streets or oddly oriented after the lots were surveyed.34 The official sale of lots began in October 1821, and more than three hundred were purchased in the initial wave. While the original settlers had built their cabins near the White River and Fall Creek, lots to the north and east went first once sales began, with buyers wanting to locate closer to the future center of the city—and also to escape the miasmal low areas near the waterways. Proceeds were earmarked for the erection of public buildings. Sales slowed dramatically after the initial rush to purchase, however, and many who made advance payments to secure lots ultimately defaulted. Perhaps because of this, Governor

______32Ida Stearns Stickney, Pioneer Indianapolis (Indianapolis, 1907), 23. 33Ibid., 3. 34Nathaniel Bolton, “Early History of Indianapolis and Central Indiana,” Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. I, No. 5 (Indianapolis, 1897), 155-56. 272 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

An 1825 view of Washington Street in downtown Indianapolis. The young town, dependent on the slow-growing state government for its own growth, developed more slowly than the riverfront cities studied by Wade. Indiana Historical Society

William Hendricks, in his annual message of November 1825, emphasized the importance of such projects: “[T]he public buildings contem- plated on the Circle and the State House Squares should be commenced as soon as practicable . . . for the commencement of the public buildings will afford strong inducements to the completion of payments, the pre- vention of forfeitures and the increase of means to finish the work.” In 1831 there were still 1,900 acres unsold, and by the mid-1830s, approximately 75 percent of the lots were still owned by the state. As of 1842, the year public land sales ended, they had contributed only about $150,000 to the building fund.35

______35Buley, Old Northwest, 1: 38; Irma Bachman, “Social Conditions in Indianapolis before 1850” (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1933), Ch. I, 13-14; Laws of Indiana (1820-21), Ch. XVIII, INDIANAPOLIS 273

As Hugh McCulloch later recalled, early settlers and visitors to Indianapolis encountered a distinctly unpromising scene:

. . . the plan of the city upon paper was attractive and artistic, but upon paper only. . . . The parks, in which were the State House, just then completed, and the court-house, had been enclosed with post and rail fences, but nothing had been done to the streets except to remove the stumps from two or three of those most used. All of the noble old trees—walnuts, oaks, poplars, the like of which will never be seen again—had been cut down, and around the parks young locust and other inferior but rapidly growing trees had been set out. There were no sidewalks, and the streets most in use, after every rain, and for a good part of the year, were knee-deep with mud.36

The city’s early growth was sedate, with the population increasing from approximately 600 in 1823 to 2,692 by 1840. Although one would expect to see a spike with the relocation of the General Assembly to the new capital in 1825, there was a hiccup at best, with the population reaching only about 760 by 1826. Much of the legislative traffic was tem- porary, swelling the population during the session, and Indianapolis was a city that many others merely passed through on their way to growing settlements or open land farther north. In October 1827 an Indianapolis editor observed that “for a week our town has scarce been clear of immi- grant wagons.” Still, the annual presence of the legislators and their circle did help the local economy.37 The city’s central location and designation as the state capital also made it a magnet for a variety of other governmental activities. The fed-

______Sec. 23; [William Hendricks], Governor’s Message, Communicated to Both Houses of the General Assembly on Tuesday the 11th Instant [January 11, 1825] (Indianapolis, 1825), 9; Max R. Hyman and George S. Cottman, Centennial History and Handbook of Indiana (Indianapolis, 1915), 309. 36Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century: Sketches and Comments (New York, 1888), 71. 37Max R. Hyman, The Journal Handbook of Indianapolis (Indianapolis, 1902), 18; Carl Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Conn., 1981), 19; Ignatius Brown, “History of Indianapolis from 1818,” in Logan’s Indianapolis Directory ([Indianapolis], 1868), 6; Buley, Old Northwest, 2: 50-51; Madison, “Businessmen and the Business Community in Indianapolis,” 2. 274 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

eral land office, for example, established in Brookville in 1823, removed to Indianapolis just two years later. As a Franklin County historian lamented: “With the land office there went hundreds of people to the new capital and to adjoining counties which were being organized.” Later, in the 1840s, newly created state schools for the blind and deaf and a state hospital for the insane were all located in the capital city.38 Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Indianapolis was not a significant exporter of goods; most of the business it conducted was either internal to its own needs or served its immediate hinterland. By the early 1830s it had become apparent that the White River was not navigable as far north as the capital.39 The high cost and difficulty of overland transportation greatly limited trade to and from the city. One result of the lack of incoming as well as outgoing trade was that local businessmen had to be general rather than specialist merchandisers. A daybook of the Union Inn, dating from the mid-1830s, in addition to showing lodging and boarding payments for men and horses, also records sales of such diverse items as alcoholic beverages, bulk corn and apples, coffee, rifles and shot, and furniture. What trade there was to distant points was arduous at best. If supplies in town ran low, a local hostler might require a month to travel to Cincinnati and back with new goods. What outgoing trade there was required a similar commitment of time and energy. In a letter to his parents in 1823, Indianapolis pioneer Calvin Fletcher observed: “Our commerce is principly [sic] with New-Orleans. Several boats will soon start from here for that place loaded with lumber, pork, beef &c. When boats start in March, the hands get back some time in July.”40 Within a few years, the question of Indianapolis’s economic vitali- ty was being debated. Locals shared a sense that the city’s early economy, which was almost wholly mercantile, needed to yield to a more sophisti- cated economic system that included manufacturing. The Indiana Journal in November 1827 observed that many of the consumer items

______38August J. Reifel, History of Franklin County, Indiana (Indianapolis, 1915), 199; Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 397, 746-47. 39Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 189-90, 1202. 40Bolton, “Early History of Indianapolis,” 168-69; Union Inn Day Book, 1833-36, in the John Elder Family Papers (BV 0257), Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis; Calvin Fletcher to Father and Mother, February 2, 1823, Box 1, Folder 1, Calvin Fletcher Papers (M 108), Indiana Historical Society Library. INDIANAPOLIS 275

The Washington Foundry in 1830s Indianapolis. By the second and third decades of its existence, Indianapolis finally began to grow into a recognizable city. Groom & Smith’s Indianapolis Directory, City Guide, and Business Mirror (Indianapolis, 1855), courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society then being imported from other places “will hereafter be furnished by our own workmen, but we can hardly expect in the present age of improvement to be able to compete with others without the aid of steam. If no individual has the capital necessary for the purpose, let the united efforts of our citizens provide for the erection of machinery, which would not only relieve us from excessive drains of money, but afford employment to the industrious of almost every age and capacity.” And, indeed, several leading citizens joined forces the next year to incorporate the Indianapolis Steam Mill Company, which built a three-story saw, grist, and wool-carding mill that opened in 1831. But four years later the business failed, “the victim of inadequate transportation facilities, insuf- ficient demand for its products, and the miscalculations of energetic, forward-looking businessmen who prematurely plunged into steam and factory production.”41 For its first decade, Indianapolis had no municipal government, but rather operated under state statutes and the county governmental structure. Marion County was established in 1821, with local officials appointed by the state. The first local county election took place in

______41Indiana Journal, November 20, 1827; Madison, The Indiana Way, 91-92. See also Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 808. 276 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

1822, with county commissioners, judges, a clerk, and a recorder taking office, but town business was conducted under state law. In February 1832 the state legislature changed the procedure for towns to become incorporated, and in September of that year the town elected five trustees. The town’s 1832 charter defined their duties, along with those of the other town officers: clerk, assessor, treasurer, and marshal. Indianapolis was granted a special charter by the General Assembly in 1836, which was followed in February 1838 by reincorporation and the adoption of another special charter. Thereafter, Indianapolis was gov- erned by a town council, with powers of taxation (limited at the time to the Mile Square), regulation, and keeping the peace. This charter would remain in effect, with some modification, until 1847, when Indianapolis would be chartered as a city.42 This gradual transfer from state to local control parallels what had happened earlier in the cities examined by Wade. It was part of the process by which control of services and fiscal matters devolved from the state to local governments, and it marked a significant stage of urban maturation.43 For Indianapolis, as will be seen, the 1847 date of the first city charter not coincidentally occurred in a watershed year in the city’s history. The nascent capital’s commingling of Upland South and eastern immigrants resulted in an admixture of cultural and other institutions and pursuits. Much of the early social life of the town was of the kind that would be expected in an isolated frontier settlement, with many tasks accomplished cooperatively. Calvin and Sarah Hill Fletcher’s diaries and letters contain numerous references to interaction with their neighbors for barn raisings, assistance with ailing family members, sewing and quilting sessions, and myriad other tasks of daily life in the wilderness that were lightened somewhat by helping each other through them. The Fletchers cite a wide variety of amusements, including weddings, Christmas and New Year parties, theater performances, circuses and animal shows, candy pulling, and evenings of games such as dominoes.44

______42Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 86-87, 404; Hyman, Journal Handbook of Indianapolis, 22; Hyman and Cottman, Centennial History, 316. 43Wade, The Urban Frontier, 271-72. 44Bachman, “Social Conditions in Indianapolis,” Ch. III, 16-17; Gayle Thornbrough, ed., The Diary of Calvin Fletcher, Vol. I, 1817-1838 (Indianapolis, 1972), 48, 49n, 51, 73, 86-87, 101-2, 135-36, 254, 268-69, 369, 383, 403. INDIANAPOLIS 277

In the founding of more formal cultural institutions, however, the eastern element tended to dominate: “[T]hey were influenced by a sense of regional superiority and by New England Protestantism, which preached civilization and Christianity to save the West—and ultimately the nation—from barbarism and license. . . . Men such as James Blake, Isaac Coe, Calvin Fletcher, and Samuel Merrill became involved in all forms of civic and reform activities, constituting an informal network that shaped much of the capital’s character and affected its daily life.”45 As early as 1822, Calvin Fletcher co-founded the Indianapolis Polemic Society, in order to realize “the mutual advantages resulting from Debating Societies.”46 In 1828, both a Handelian singing society and the Indianapolis Library Society were formed, followed within five years by the Indiana Historical Society (1830) and the Indianapolis Lyceum/ Athenaeum (1831).47 While many of these organizations lasted only a short time, they were often forerunners of more permanent institutions that flourished by mid-century. They also show the impetus toward cultural activity that recreated for educated early settlers the milieu from which they came and that they believed to be a necessary part of any city’s path to prosperity. The earliest religious meetings in the city, being few, were likely attended “without regard to denomination,” but distinct congregations began forming as early as 1822, with the first Baptist group organizing in that year and the Presbyterians in 1823.48 The founding of churches led in many cases to the establishment of schools under religious auspices. The first Presbyterian school was established at the church of that denomination in 1824. The first Methodist school was established several years later, in 1829, and the first Baptist school in 1832. In 1833-34, the county seminary was built on University Square, followed by the Indianapolis Female Institute, which opened in 1837. One city chronicler commented of the latter that “[i]t was a good school, but the Misses [Mary and Harriet] Axtell,” who ran the institute in its early years, “were strongly imbued with the rather intolerant religious ideas of the old New England

______45Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 39. 46James Blake Papers (SC 99), Folder 1, Indiana Historical Society Library. 47Bodenhamer and Barrows, Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 40. 48Dunn, Greater Indianapolis, 1:86-87. 278 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

dispensation.”49 Multi-denominational groups interested in social control and welfare also developed fairly early in the city; these included the Temperance Society of Marion County in 1828, the Indiana Colonization Society in 1829, and the Indianapolis Benevolent Society in 1835.50 Because Indianapolis was the capital, much social discourse was political in nature. In the fall of 1824, for example, “in anticipation of the [inaugural] meeting of the Legislature [in January 1825] the citizens formed a ‘mock’ body . . . called the ‘Indianapolis Legislature,’ the members of which assigned themselves to any counties they chose, and discussed pretty much the same questions as the real Legislature had discussed, or would when it met.”51 Often, members of the state General Assembly, during their own legislative session, would attend meetings of the “Indianapolis Legislature,” giving citizens access to lawmakers that many today would envy. In addition, the mock legislature was reported- ly an unusually democratic body for the time, as “it was a great resort of the ladies of the place, which greatly added to the interest of the discus- sions.” The presence of the General Assembly also had a broader effect on the town. “The influx of strangers, with new topics of thought and conversation, excited the quiet villagers; and after the session opened crowds of gaping natives witnessed the proceedings with unsated curios- ity.”52 Once the legislators departed, however, Indianapolis went back to being “a dull country village, with no excitement beyond the annual sessions, when a little animation was given to society and to trade. It seemed to have attained its growth.” For a good portion of the year, the town was cut off from the rest of the state by impassable roads and non- navigable waterways. As Ignatius Brown recalled several decades later, “It is impossible, at present . . . to realize the situation of the early settlers after a Spring thaw or a long wet spell, separated from civilization by sixty miles of mud and slush, with unbridged streams, floating cor- duroys and fathomless mud holes.”53

______49Brown, “History of Indianapolis from 1818,” 12; B. R. Sulgrove, History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana (Philadelphia, 1884), 417; W. R. Holloway, Indianapolis: A Historical and Statistical Sketch of the Railroad City (Indianapolis, 1870), 61. 50Dunn, Greater Indianapolis, 1:447; Thornbrough, ed., Diary of Calvin Fletcher, 1:186n; Sulgrove, History of Indianapolis, 379. 51Sulgrove, History of Indianapolis, 57. 52Bolton, “Early History of Indianapolis,” 170. 53Brown, “History of Indianapolis from 1818,” 5, 15, 19. INDIANAPOLIS 279

The first roads around Indianapolis were county roads leading to nearby settlements such as Pendleton and Mooresville. In 1821, in anticipation of the removal of the capital, the General Assembly appropriated $100,000 for state road construction, in particular connections from Lawrenceburg and Madison to Indianapolis, and then on to other growing towns including Noblesville and Crawfordsville. Even with such improvements, however, travel remained difficult. The first stagecoach between Madison and Indianapolis, a distance of about ninety miles, began operation in 1828, and the trip took four days.54 The National Road, though planned to pass through Indiana, was originally routed about thirty miles to the south of what became the city’s site. The Indiana General Assembly prevailed upon the federal government to alter the route, and the road ultimately passed through the capital on Washington Street. In addition, the Michigan Road connect- ing Madison to Lake Michigan also passed through town. Both roads were greeted with much anticipation: “Permanent advantages are held forth, sufficient to stimulate our citizens to be active in improvement, and offer many inducements for emigrants to settle amongst us.” Where the National Road was concerned, however, one historian has held that “its direct advantage beyond macadamizing Washington street, was not at all equal to the anticipations of the citizens. It became a thoroughfare for emigration to the Mississippi and beyond but it left here little of the deposit that was borne along by its current. It did a vast deal for the West but not much for Indianapolis.” For many years the National Road suf- fered from the same difficult traveling conditions for much of the year as did other routes radiating from Indianapolis, and neither it nor the Michigan Road brought the anticipated benefit of significantly increased trade.55 Wade claimed that “nothing . . . accelerated the rise of the Western cities so much as the introduction of the steamboat.”56 Some three decades later it was the coming of the railroad that would prove the most significant event in the early history of Indianapolis. Infected by the rail-

______54Stickney, Pioneer Indianapolis, 41; Leary, Indianapolis, 19; Carmony, Indiana, 1816-1850, 133. 55“A Memorial of the General Assembly of the state of Indiana . . . on the subject of the great national road,” in Laws of Indiana (1820-21), Ch. LXXV; Indianapolis Gazette, June 12, 1827; Holloway, Indianapolis, 15-16; James M. Bergquist, “Tracing the Origins of a Midwestern Culture: The Case of Central Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, 77 (March 1981), 30. 56Wade, The Urban Frontier, 70. 280 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

road fever that had spread following the completion in 1830 of the Baltimore & Ohio, the first U.S. railroad, the General Assembly in February 1832 passed acts to incorporate no fewer than five railroads that would originate in, terminate in, or pass through the capital city. The Mammoth Internal Improvements Act of 1836 appropriated $1.3 million for completion of a rail line from Madison to Lafayette by way of Columbus, Indianapolis, and Crawfordsville, as well as the same amount to assess the practicability of a route from Jeffersonville to Crawfordsville and “the faith of the state” to do the same for a line from Fort Wayne to Michigan City.57 The collapse of the Internal Improvements initiative in 1839 left many half-finished projects and significantly slowed railroad construction. As a result, the line from Madison to Indianapolis, the first operat- ing railroad in the state, was not completed until October 1847. It would be hard to overestimate the impact of the railroad on the city; even so, the editor of the Indiana State Journal waxed hyperbolic in describing the euphoria that accompanied the opening of the line: “Indianapolis has changed. Friday, October 1st, 1847, was an era in our history. On that day we were linked with commerce. From the beginning of the world until that day, the rattling of the cars and the whistle of the locomotive were unknown sounds, but from then until the end of civilization, perhaps to the end of time, those sounds will never die away.”58 While more prosaic, later assessments agree in spirit with the editor’s sentiments. Historians at the state’s centennial remarked on the transformative nature of the availability of rail commerce: “Business at once revived and new stores were opened, and new factories started, while others were projected. Up to that time the stores kept a little of everything, but a railroad demanded a division of trade, and stores for dry goods and stores for groceries were opened. The price of property advanced, and a new city government organized.”59 The population grew dramatically as well. While in the city’s first twenty-five years the population had not yet reached 5,000, in the five years following the opening of the Madison & Indianapolis, the town grew to 6,500 in 1849, 8,000 in 1850, and 10,800

______57Laws of Indiana (1831-32), Ch. CXLIV-CXLIX; Carmony, Indiana, 1816-1850, 196. 58Indiana State Journal, November 2, 1847. 59Hyman and Cottman, Centennial History, 319-20. INDIANAPOLIS 281

in 1852.60 The population quadrupled in the decade after the coming of the railroad, and “by 1870 the railroads had made Indianapolis the commercial as well as the political capital of Indiana.”61 Wade describes the “town-making mania” that gripped the trans- Allegheny West in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and comments that “by the twenties the West was littered with ambi- tious towns that never grew. . . . In retrospect it would be easy to account for the failure of each. Some were too easily inundated at high water, others too remote from a navigable stream, and still others were too close to already successful towns.”62 Indianapolis fits two of the three criteria in this last sentence, so what were the elements that enabled it to endure, and then to flourish, in the decades after Wade’s narrative ends? Why did Indianapolis survive in spite of its lacking Pred’s “geographical expressions of initial advantage,” such as access to transportation, and having poor drainage conditions that led to early seasons of disease? The foremost factor must be its status as state capital, which automatically made the town the center of a certain degree of activity that proceeded regardless of other less than ideal conditions. Wade, as noted earlier, claims that “the central nexus of the urbanization of the West was commerce.”63 In Indianapolis, however, merchants and other boosters of the town’s economy faced challenges more daunting than those in Wade’s case study cities. While there clearly was a “business community” in antebellum Indianapolis, its members had to devote much of their attention during the town’s first two decades to “numerous attempts to end their near isolation.” At the end of the 1830s the reality they and their fellow residents faced, in Madison’s words, was “an unfinished canal that was useless for transportation purposes, a railroad less than one-third complete, and several roads that caused more dissatisfaction than pride.”64 In that situation the governmental “industry” provided just enough economic activity that Indianapolis was able to survive the lean years of barely passable roads and a non-navigable river.

______60Geib, Indianapolis, 25; Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen, 19. 61Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 39. 62Wade, The Urban Frontier, 32, 33. 63Ibid., 66. 64Madison, “Businessmen and the Business Community in Indianapolis,” 9, 25. 282 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

The era of the “urban frontier” in the Hoosier capital drew to a close when the railroad finally arrived, giving impetus to the city’s rapid development during the 1850s. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Indianapolis boasted a population of 18,611 and had clearly become not only the governmental but also the economic capital of the state.