Elkhart, Indiana

“ It is late afternoon when we reach Joliet, and we drive on to Elkhart, where we put up at a beautiful hotel with every modern convenience. The Indiana roads are in excellent condition and take us through a lovely rolling country of oaks and beech forests, and of fields of grain breathing pastoral peace and prosperity.
All along through the Middle West we have been pleased to see the immense interest taken in the Lincoln Highway. Everywhere one sees the Lincoln Highway signs used in abundance on the streets through which the Highway passes. ”

“ The city has a Carnegie library, and is the seat of Goshen College (under Mennonite control) , chartered as Elkhart Institute, at Elkhart, Ind., in 1895, and removed to Goshen and opened under its present name in 1903. The college includes a collegiate department, an academy, a Bible school, a normal school, a summer school and correspondence courses, and schools of business, of music and of oratory, and in 1908–1909 had 331 students, 73 of whom were in the Academy. Goshen is situated in a good farming region and is an important lumber market. There is a good water-power. ”

“ ILLINOIS, Logan County, Lincoln, Lincoln Courthouse Square Historic District, Roughly bounded by Sagamon, Pekin, Chicago, Delaware, Broadway & Pulaski Sts. (12/24/85)
INDIANA, Elkhart County, Elkhart, Monteith, Mark L. and Harriet E., House, 871 E. Beardsley Ave. ”

“ The city is in a rich farming country, which produces Indian corn, oats and wheat; and is in the Indiana natural gas region, to which fact it owes its rapid growth as a manufacturing centre. It is one of the principal seats of the glass industry in Indiana— plate glass, lamp chimneys, mirrors, &c., being manufactured here—and also has mineral wool factories and paper mills. The municipality owns and operates the water-works and the gas-lighting plant. Alexandria was founded in 1836 and was chartered as a city in 1893. ”

“ What a glorious casket! Away with the cane! The pallor of his countenance is a part of the uncanny mockery of the night. There is no better speaker on the floor of the Senate. His thoughts flow fresh, clear, sparkling, like water from a hill-side spring. It is true, Indiana is a benighted State, morally defective, as seen by her divorces; her territory swampy, with fever and ague a yearly crop. But which is the best harvest a State can yield? Why men, to be sure, and when this fact is considered Indiana need not feel ashamed of herself. ”

“ Fruitlessly wandering through the wilderness in search of the Mississippi River, the Illinois country and Canada, he was killed by his followers in March, 1687.
[114] Elkhart is a city of factories. Band instruments, furniture, telephone supplies, drugs, carriages, and many other products are included among its manufactures, which have an annual value of more than $15,000,000. Two Mennonite papers are published here. ”

“ A president and a vice-president of the United States have been on the club’s rolls, as have cabinet officers, senators in Congress and foreign ministers; but literary and ethical questions, oftener than political problems, have vexed its discussions, and it has been more interested as a society in Newman, Arnold, and Emerson, and in the thwarting of the Zeitgeist, than in material things. The women of Indiana have been important contributors to all agencies that tend toward ideal living, and at Indianapolis they have exerted an intelligent and beneficent influence in literature. ”

“ When the way was opened, the Middle States and New England slowly contributed to the population. Many of these immigrants paused first in the Western Reserve of Ohio, and a smaller proportion in Michigan. It is a question for the scientists whether the differences still observable between the people of the northern prairie region in Indiana and those of the woodland areas—differences of thrift, energy, and initiative [3] —are not due as much to natural conditions as to racial influences ”

“ It is a safe prediction that some later chronicler of Gopher Prairie will present a very different community from that revealed in Main Street. Casting about for an instance of a State whose history is illustrated by its literature, I pray to be forgiven if I fall [15] back upon Indiana. Edward Eggleston was an early, if not indeed the first, American realist. It is now the habit of many Indianians to flout the Hoosier Schoolmaster as a libel upon a State that struts and boasts of its culture and refuses to believe that it ever numbered ignorant or vulgar people among its inhabitants. ”

“ One reason assigned for the passing of emigrants through Indiana to Illinois was that the latter was a prairie country, more easily subdued than the more wooded region of Indiana. But it is also true that the sluggish, illiterate character of its early occupants turned aside the stream of Western emigration from its borders. There has been a great deal of philosophic speculation upon the acknowledged backwardness of civilization in Indiana, its slow development in institutions of education, and its slow change in rural life, compared with its sister States. ”

“ Indianapolis is only twenty years old, having been, upon its site, a dense forest in 1820; now it has several public buildings, churches, schools, court-house, etc., and two thousand inhabitants. The amount of tolls taken upon the canals and railroads of Indiana amount to twenty-eight thousand five hundred dollars. Salt of a very fine kind is made in Fountain county. Its population is six hundred and eighty-three thousand three hundred and fourteen. ”

“ The centre of population in the United States, which lay just east of Baltimore in the first decade of the century, moved gradually westward, until, in the last decade, it lay in Indiana at a point sixty-five miles south of Indianapolis.
The older Indiana towns enjoyed in their beginnings all the benefits that may be bestowed upon new communities by a people of good social antecedents. Many of these towns have lost their prestige, owing to changed political or commercial [11] conditions; the departed glory of some of them is only a tradition among the elders ”

“ He had been educated as a mechanical engineer, and the law was an afterthought. His years at Exeter and the Tech, prolonged by his law course at Harvard, had quickened his speech and modified its Hoosier flavor. He passed for an Eastern man with strangers. He was the fourth of his name in the community, and it was a name, distinguished in war and peace, that was well sprinkled through the pages of Indiana history. ”

“ Now, you've all got the idea that because Thursday night prayer meeting is still well patronized in Indianapolis and all good women go to market on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, nothing amusing ever happens here except candidates for the vice presidency and little things like that. But you're all wrong, as I've tried to prove to you ever since we began having these little parties. Visitors are always asking why Indiana is a literary center, and the real reason is that the Hoosiers are different and do things differently. ”

“ It cannot be doubted that such a character possessed by any State or county attracts immigration and capital, advances its material development, and enhances the value of its farms. There has been much in the history of Indiana that is exceedingly creditable. There have been some things—there are some things to-day—that are exceedingly discreditable to us as a political community; things that I believe retard the advancement of our State and affect its material prosperity by degrading it in the estimation of right-thinking men. ”

“ A lady with whom I frequently exchange opinions on the trolley-cars of my town took me to task recently for commending Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street as an achievement worthy of all respect. “I know a score of Indiana towns and they are not like Gopher Prairie,” she declared indignantly. “No,” I conceded, “they are not; but the Indiana towns you have in mind are older than Gopher Prairie; many of them have celebrated their centennial; they were founded by well-seasoned pioneers of the old American stocks ”

“ One-seventh of the adult population could not read, and a large proportion of those who could read did so imperfectly. In spite of the constitutional provision of the State and the famous ‘sixteenth section,’ the common schools of Indiana were in bad condition. As late as [81] 1846 the State rated lowest among the free States as to its popular intelligence and means of popular education. Even the capital of the State did not have a free school until 1853, and then one was kept open only two months.” [34]
The census of 1840 showed the illiteracy of Indiana to be 14.32 per cent. ”

“ The artistic impulse appeared naturally in later generations. The value of the literature produced in the State may be debatable, but there is no just occasion for surprise that attention to literary expression has been so general.
Indiana has always lain near the currents of national life, and her beginnings were joined to the larger fortunes of the national destiny. Three flags have been emblems of government in her territory, and wars whose principal incidents occurred far from the western wilderness played an important part in her history. ”

“ The women of Indianapolis have aided greatly in fashioning the city into an enlightened community. The wives and daughters of the founders were often women of cultivation, and much in the character of the city to-day is plainly traceable to their work and example. During the Civil War they did valiant service in caring for the Indiana soldier. ”

“ From 1820, the date of the founding of Indianap [Pg 170] olis, to 1860, Indiana had twice quadrupled her population and from almost purely American stock. During these forty years, it is calculated that a million people came to the Northwest from the slave States of the South. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Indiana had a population of 1,350,000 of which only about one in eleven was foreign-born. More than half of the aliens were from Germany, and Indiana seems to have attracted particularly the Nordic element, since Prussia contributed the largest quota. ”

“ They take their wives along with 'em to the University, so they can have a rest and learn to bake bread that won't bring up the death-rate; and when those women go home they dig the nails out of the windows to let the fresh air in, and move the melodeon to the wood-pile, and quit frying meat except when the minister stops for dinner. It's all pretty comfortable and cheerful and busy in Indiana, with lots of old-fashioned human kindness flowing round ”

“ Edward Eggleston has always counted it a piece of good-fortune to have been born in a small village of Southern Indiana, for he believes that the formative influences of such an environment, the intimate knowledge of simple human nature, the close acquaintance with nature in woods and field and stream, and the sincere and earnest tone of the religious atmosphere which he breathed all through his youth, are better elements of culture than a city life could have furnished. ”

“ The injunction mind out, which is used in Kentucky in such admonitions as “mind out what you are doing,” becomes watch out in Indiana. Wrench for rinse, used in the States contiguous to the Ohio, is rense in New England. Critter for horse is still heard in parts of rural Indiana, which derived population through Kentucky, where the same usage is noted. Fruit, as applied to stewed apples (apple sauce) only, is a curious limitation of the noun, heard among old-fashioned people of Southern origin in Indiana. ”

“ We have seen its seat of authority at Quebec, at New Orleans, at Cincinnati, at Vincennes, and finally at Kaskaskia. We have noted something of its marvellous development, of its wonderful increase in population.
"Just one hundred and seven years ago, when by act of Congress Illinois became part of the Indiana Territory, it contained a population of less than two thousand white persons, only eight hundred of whom were of the English-speaking race. ”

“ Since then, the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and the long strip of country known as the Territory of Wisconsin, have been carved out of it. Indiana, which numbers but twenty years since the commencement of her political existence, contains a population of six hundred thousand, equal to the population of Massachusetts, a State of two hundred years’ duration. In age she is an infant; in strength and resources a giant. Her appearance indicates the 402 full vigor of maturity, while, measured by her years, she is yet in the cradle. ”

“ There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence ”

“ In the Northwest, where interstate migration has been so continuous and widespread, the lack of typical State peculiarities is obvious, and the student of society, like the traveler, is tempted, in his effort to distinguish the community from its neighbors, to exaggerate the odd and exceptional elements which give a particular flavor to the State. Indiana has suffered somewhat from this tendency ”

“ In the larger cities, as Indianapolis, Evansville, and Fort Wayne, the Germans had an important part from the beginning, and the Irish were well distributed; but before the Scandinavians and Slavs had begun to seek homes in America, the land values in Indiana had so appreciated that this class of immigrants could find no footing. ”