Gary, Indiana

“ The visitor who goes to-day to Gary finds a typically varied American city, rather better built than the average, and rather unusually favored in its open spaces. Situated within thirty miles of Chicago, the city presents a rather pleasing contrast to the long chain of industrial towns that stretches for miles in every direction across the treeless prairie. With a well-built business section, lines of residence streets, handsome public buildings and churches, electric cars and taxi-cabs, Gary has a settled air of community life unusual even for an older town. ”

“ I stopped at Greensburg, Ind., on my way East and found there a remarkable illustration showing just how feeling arises in the North. Greensburg is a comfortable, well-to-do, conservative, church-going old town in eastern Indiana. Many of the residents are retired farmers. The population of 7,000 is mostly of pure American stock, largely of Northern origin. And yet last April this quiet old town was shaken by a race riot. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Agriculture has the advantage of a very superior system of railroad transportation, and of numerous city markets within the State. Besides, proximity to such great centres in adjoining States as Chicago, Cincinnati, and Louisville opens up a wider field. Indiana is not divided into crop belts, nor does any one crop have a monopoly. ”

“ Indiana, a typical American State, owes nothing worth mentioning to the original French population. In early days it must be considered little more than an extension of Kentucky. Virginia had set aside a large tract for rewarding the men of George Rogers Clark's expedition and these were the original land agents, so to speak, for the territory. But all along the border a frontier population drifted there across the Ohio River. As late as 1850 there were twice as many Southern people in Indiana as there were from the Middle States and New England put together. ”

“ The farms are commonly cultivated on the three-crop rotation system. The proximity of such good markets as Chicago, Cincinnati, St Louis and Louisville, in addition to the local markets, and the unusual opportunities afforded by the railways that traverse every portion of the state, have been important factors in the rapid agricultural advance which has enabled Indiana to keep pace with the newly developed states farther west. ”

“ Think of a long, smooth red brick road stretching out before you mile after mile, the blue waters of Lake Erie to your right, with its waves, ships and gulls; a flat, Holland-like farming land to your left, with occasional small white towns, factory centers, and then field upon field of hay, corn, cabbages, wheat, potatoes—mile after mile and mile after mile.
Ohio is too flat. It hasn’t the rural innocence and unsophistication which Indiana seems still to retain, nor yet the characteristics of a thoroughgoing manufacturing world. ”

“ General Remarks.—The importance of Indiana, as a desirable State for the attention of the emigrant to the West, has been too much overlooked. Though not possessing quite equal advantages with Illinois, especially in the quality and amount of prairie soil, it is far superior to Ohio, and fully equal,—nay, in our estimation, rather superior to Michigan. Almost every part is easy of access, and in a very few years the liberal system of internal improvements, adopted and in progress, will make almost every county accessible to public conveyances, and furnish abundant facilities to market. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the Ohio and White Water river valleys a sandstone and limestone formation predominates. The north and north central portions of the state, formerly rather swampy, have become since the clearing of the forests as productive as the south central. The most fertile part of the state is the Wabash valley; the least fertile the sandy region, of small extent, immediately south of Lake Michigan.
Industry and Manufactures.—Agriculture has always been and still is the chief industry of the state of Indiana. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here, in the country, and up in the Adirondacks you are the real Indiana."
"That's nonsense! We can't be girl and boy forever. There's something else in life—I suppose."
"What?" said Glen.
"I don't know," answered Indiana impatiently, "but it's individual. People must discover it for themselves—"
"Have you?" asked Glen.
"No," answered Indiana.
"I have," said Glen. ”

“ Numbers of Germans, French, and Irish, are scattered in the towns, and over the country, carrying on the business of bakers, grocers, store, grog shops, and tavern keepers. In time, these people will become steady from necessity, and consequently prosperous. The number of the inhabitants of Indiana amounts to 215,000. Its admission into the Union as a sovereign state, dates from the year 1815 to 1816; its constitution differs in some points from that of Ohio, and its governor is elected for the term of three years. ”

“ From Chicago, or Colorado, or San Francisco one may expect a giant labor war or social upheaval of any kind; from Boston or Pennsylvania or New Mexico new religious movements may come—and have; New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois can and have contributed vast political upheavals. This is even true of Ohio, its next door neighbor.
But Indiana lies in between all this—simple, unpretentious, not indifferent but quiescent,—a happy land of farms and simple industries which can scarcely be said to have worked any harm to any man. ”

“ 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 rises in the State of Ohio, flows across Indiana, and, turning southward, makes for a long distance the Illinois boundary. Its chief city is Terre Haute, the "High Ground," about seventy miles west of Indianapolis, another prominent railroad centre, having forty-five thousand people, with extensive manufactures. It is surrounded by valuable coal-fields, is built upon an elevated plateau, and, like all these prairie cities, is noted for its many broad and well-shaded streets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The native American element has always predominated politically and socially. For an American city of its size to-day, Gary represents, not a specialized community, but a fairly harmonious distribution of social classes, races, occupations, and interests. It is essentially a normal, variedly functioning, 6independent community, and the schools have been developed to meet the needs of a modern varied urban community. ”

“ Indiana resembles Illinois in its physical features. Lying within the prairie region, it has a gently undulating surface which slopes by imperceptible stages toward the southwest, The northeastern part has an elevation of 1000 to 1200 feet, the northwestern 500 to 700 feet; along the Ohio River the elevations are about 500 feet in the southeast and 300 feet in the southwest. There are sandy hills near Lake Michigan, and a series of low elevations of glacial origin occurs in the southern part, extending from the Ohio, in Clark County, northwestward to Parke County on the Wabash. ”

“ The Stars fall. Move. Texas. The flood of 1844. First School. White River's Pocket. No Nimrod. A Fish Story. Clarksburg.
At the time of father's arrival, Indiana was only 14 years old and contained about 300,000 inhabitants. Its capital city's first Mayor was inaugurated two years before I was born and three years after the stars fell.
In 1842 when I was about four years old my parents sold out and moved down the river five or six miles and bought a new, larger and better farm with a large two story hewed log house and a big double log barn, and a good apple orchard. ”

“ I could not help thinking of all the days we (I am referring to a part of our family) had lived in these small towns and how as a boy I used to wish and wish for so many things. The long trains going through! The people who went to Chicago, or Evansville, or Terre Haute, or Indianapolis! A place like Brazil, Indiana, a mere shabby coal town of three or four thousand population, seemed something wonderful. All the world was outside and I, sitting on our porch—front or back—or on the grass or under a tree, all alone, used to wonder and wonder. When would I go out into the world? ”

“ For finance of education and charitable and penal institutions, see paragraphs under those headings.
Population. In one or two respects Indiana differs much from other Northern States in point of population. It has been less affected by immigration, the native-born population being proportionally greater than that of any other Northern State. Furthermore, the population is peculiar in that a large per cent. ”