Toward a Geographical History of Historical

Toward a Geographical History of Indiana: Landscape and Place in the Historical Imagination John A. Jakle “The muses care so little for geography.” Oscar Wilde, Sententiae Born at Terre Haute and graduated with a high school di- ploma from Culver Military Academy and a Ph.D. from Indiana University, I hold considerable affection for the Hoosier state. But it was in neighboring Michigan that I grew up, and for the past quarter century I have lived in adjacent Illinois, a professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Al- though mine has tended to be the view of an outsider looking in, Indiana has always struck me as a distinctive place if only in its landscapes. Take, for example, what the watchful motorist can see upon entering Indiana from the north or the east. On the second- ary, or “blue highways,” rights-of-way tend to be narrower in Indi- ana, the roads not over-engineered with the wide sweeping curves and the monotonously level straightaways of Michigan and Illi- nois. In Indiana highways seem to fit more readily into the passing scene. Signs crowd the roads as do fences and, frequently, houses and other buildings (Figures 1 and 2). Except when seen from the freeways the Indiana countryside seems to be resisting modernism. There is a kinship with the past evident in the smaller scale of things, even new things, pushed close to Indiana roads. Could such differences be symptomatic of things profound? What might they mean to students of Indiana’s past? To me they have always suggested at the very least that In- diana may be more like Kentucky than its other neighbors. Could this be true? If so, is it important? Surely the state’s settlement history must reflect vividly in its contemporary landscapes. Or is that conclusion merely the wishful thinking of a geographer overly anxious to see contemporary landscapes as a kind of archive ca- pable of exposing the past to view? INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, LXXXIX (September, 1993). 1993, Trustees of Indiana University. Fig. 1. Fences and signs closely line many Indiana highways, helping to define for the state a “sense of place” rooted as much in past as in contemporary technologies. Fig. 2. Houses elbow one another close to U. S. 40 at East Germantown. Landscape and Place 179 One can see subtle differences as well in Indiana’s small towns. Highways tend to crunch through the centers of Indiana places, often right down Main Street. Unlike Illinois, Indiana has not been so preoccupied with bypasses, both those that skirt down- towns and those that skirt towns altogether. In Illinois one has to make an effort to get to the center of things, but in Indiana one is deposited there as a matter of course. Only around the major cities, and usually only on the freeways, can travelers practice urban avoidance in the Hoosier state. I think that in Indiana there is a definite temporal rhythm to travel, a rhythm often readily notice- able in the configuration of the roads themselves. Across the center of the state U. S. 40 expands and contracts its width at the closely spaced towns, places originally positioned to serve the wagon traf- fic of the old National Road (Figure 3). What might this mean? Should we care? Fig. 3. U. S. 40 constricts at the center of Lewistown, the narrow hilltop Main Street visible for miles when approaching from both east and west. The conservative influences in Indiana that minimize expen- ditures on public rights-of-way seemingly sustain as well minimum interference in the use of adjacent private property. A tradition of weak land use control through zoning and other devices has pro- duced in Indiana towns and cities profound temporal juxtaposi- tions. From the most recent convenience store, car wash, or drive- in bank, one can trace back decade by decade the history of a town at a single glance. Mixed in and showing through the more recent layers of built environment at town centers are automobile show- rooms relic from the 1950s, chain stores from the 1920s, lodge halls and opera houses from the 1870s, and, often, a tavern or a hotel 180 Indiana Magazine of History from before the Civil War. As Hoosier Scott Russell Sanders (1989, p. 5) notes, Indiana is “a hodgepodge of contradictory visions.” Indiana towns display time depth not because they have been fossilized as museums at some distant time (of course, the state does have its share of such places) but because changes manifested over the decades stand vividly portrayed in the juxtapositioning of diverse things, each surviving from a different warp in time. Indi- ana towns seem to share a subtle style of weaving together such fabrics. Pastness in landscape is a visible accumulation of overlap- ping traces from successive periods, each trace modifying and mod- ified to form a collage of no single period (Jakle and Wilson, 1992, p. 15). What remains are varying design vocabularies, each reflect- ing off the others to give a sense of cumulative temporal depth. Indiana’s landscapes thus tend to invite careful reading. The state’s built environments are, by and large, rich texts. What prob- ably should excite historians most, of course, are the places where encrustations of the state’s earliest decades persist relatively little influenced by more contemporary development (as in the older por- tion of the city of Madison) or, additionally, where they are delib- erately contrived to be “historic” (as at New Harmony). These are the obvious places where “history” is in the process of being spared the ravages of modernization (or, at least, the intrusiveness of many modern things) or where pastness is being overtly contrived. Change in these places involves strong “rearview mirror vision” (Figure 4). Old horizons are being rejuvenated and given extended Fig. 4. Madison on the Ohio River offers relic townscapes highly reminiscent of early and mid-nineteenth-century origins. Here are built environments quintessentially“historical.” Landscape and Place 181 life. A new horizon is being configured to complement the old by strongly suggesting pastness. Where historic preservation thrives, people have learned to read their landscapes for intrinsic values, aesthetic and otherwise. Discovery has been followed by invest- ment, perhaps the most meaningful form of historical landscape affirmation in American society. Why have the historians of Indiana proven so little interested in reading the state’s built environments? Why is there so little emphasis on landscape as a kind of text? Can students of Indiana history not see the landscape as a depository of historical facts, a kind of archive to be tapped? Why are they not more sensitive to the symbolisms of material culture? The built environment results from human enterprise. Once formed, however, the built environment influences subsequent enterprise. It is a social production that helps engender further production in continuing rounds of symbiotic relationship. Why have Indiana historians been slow to grasp this basic organizing fact? Of course, there are some who have accepted the challenge. Thomas J. Schlereth (1985) in cele- brating Indiana’s U. S. 40, for example, has laid a savvy base from which to engender comprehension of Indiana’s landscapes generally. But can many others be brought on board? That certainly is my objective here. I offer in this essay focus on the concept of landscape, specifi- cally those aspects of landscape that I call the built environment. Landscape is an idea useful in tying human events to the realities of place. This is a lesson learned relatively recently by historical and cultural geographers, and it is the viewpoint that I would pass along to students of Indiana history as they grapple with the es- sence of their state as geographical context. What follows is a brief assessment of how historians traditionally have viewed geography and a brief outline of human geography’s growth as a discipline, emphasizing historical and cultural geography as subdisciplines in- creasingly formed around the study of landscapes. Finally, through an explicit review of the literature, embracing the works of both historians and geographers, I outline the makings of a geographical history focused on Indiana. GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY Most historians are quick to say how important geography is to the study of history. By this endorsement they generally refer to physical geography or natural environment viewed as neutral context. “Geography is the stage upon which history is acted,” many historians affirm. Such is the old truism. But few historians seem to recognize that messages are embedded in the stage by human action and that those messages, hardly neutral at all, serve to influence subsequent action. Props invested with strong meanings carry much of the play’s communication. Theater is made in- 182 Indiana Magazine of History telligible not only by the spoken lines and the body language of the actors but as well by the spatial structuring of the stage setby the sense of place created on stage. It is, therefore, not physical geography but human geography that should count the mostthe human geography of strong social meanings manifested as the material culture of built environment. Can the history of Indiana be fully written without concern for the diversity of its places-the places variously defined at different geographical scales that have comprised the Indiana experience? Can the story be fully told without focus on the processes that created specific kinds of places as generic habitats? Can historians ignore specific localities? How was it to confront wilderness in the creation of a farm? How was it to spare wilder places in arresting farm, town, and city development in the creation of state parks and forests? How was it to live in a time of thriving small towns? How was it to experience the collapse of a once viable city neighbor- hood? Progress and failure, the stuff of historical change, has played out in real places in Indiana with names like Pigeon Roost, Conner Prairie, Turkey Run, Gas City, Muncie, Indianapolis, Fountain Square.

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