South Bend, Indiana

“ This action was commenced by the defendant in error in the circuit court of St. Joseph county, Indiana, to compel the Terre Haute & Logansport Railway Company to open its tracks and yards within Calvert street in South Bend, to make the roadbed conform to the street grade, to plank the crossing of the same, and to make that crossing safe and convenient for the passage of persons and vehicles. ”

“ INDIANA, St. Joseph County, South Bend, I & M Building (Downtown South Bend Historic MRA) , 220 W. Colfax (06/05/85)
INDIANA, St. Joseph County, South Bend, J. M. S. Building (Downtown South Bend Historic MRA) , 108 N. Main (06/05/85)
INDIANA, St. Joseph County, South Bend, Kerr, John G., Company (Downtown South Bend Historic MRA) , 121 W. Colfax (06/05/85)
INDIANA, St. Joseph County, South Bend, Knights of Columbus-Indiana Club (Downtown South Bend Historic MRA) , 320 W. Jefferson Blvd. ”

“ If the state of Indiana incorporates a railroad to build a road from New Albany through Indianapolis to South Bend, and that road is built, can it be that the courts may compel the road to receive passengers and transport freight, but, in the absence of a specific direction from the legislature, are powerless to compel the road to stop its trains and build a depot at Indianapolis? ”

“ The most important manufacturing centres are Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Evansville, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Anderson, Hammond, Richmond, Muncie, Michigan City and Elwood, each having a gross annual product of more than $6,000,000. ”

“ Whereas South Bend was a hamlet of perhaps twenty houses until this prospect opened up a future, it is now an incorporated city which is spending large sums in street improvements, hotels, and business houses. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ The man whose name is associated with this road, will live in the memory of men, forever; at least he ought to.
I have been over northern Illinois and 150 miles, or so, into Indiana—over a region that I traveled 15 years ago. On every hill and valley and stream, the Anglo-Saxon has, in this little time, written his character in signs that a half century of barbarism could not efface. After leaving the lake region and going south into Indiana, although the setment [settlement] dates back far anterior to that of central Wisconsin, the improvement is much less marked. ”

“ Manufacturing Company being the largest in the world) , plough and agricultural machine works—the Oliver Chilled Plow Works, founded by James Oliver (1823–1909) , being particularly well known—the wood-working department of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, iron and steel foundries, flour-mills, and paper and pulp mills. The water-supply is obtained from 122 artesian wells, with a daily capacity of about 24,000,000 gallons. South Bend was the site of an Indian village and of a French trading post. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Romance has not attached to them where they linger in Southern Indiana, although they are of the same strain as their kindred at the south who have [9] so often delighted the readers of fiction. By way of illustration it may be said that in the hills of Brown County the traveller passes here and there a rude wagon drawn by oxen. A dusty native walks beside the team, and seated on the floor of the wagon is an old grandmother, smoking a clay pipe with great contentment. ”

“ Distribution.—Southwestern Indiana and southern Illinois south to northern Florida and Texas. In Indiana it has been found only in Knox, Gibson, Posey and Perry Counties. It grows on the low borders of river sloughs, swamps and river banks. It is very tolerant of shade and may be found growing under larger trees. ”

“ The rapid settlement of Indiana was a part of the great westward movement beginning with the panic of 1819, and the hard times that followed. The price of cotton was steadily declining in the South and it was easy for the poorer farmer heavily in debt to sell out or simply pack up and quit, moving on to free and richer land in a new country. ”

“ Distribution.—Maine, northern shore of Lake Erie, to west central Indiana and south to northern Georgia and Alabama. In Indiana its distribution is limited to the knobstone and sandstone area of the State. Its distribution has been fairly well mapped. Two large trees on the edge of the top of the bluff of the Ohio River at Marble Hill which is located in the south corner of Jefferson County is the eastern limit of its range. It crowns some of the ridges, sometimes extending down the adjacent slopes a short distance, from Floyd County north to the south side of Salt Creek in Brown County. ”

“ The Kentucky side, to-day, from Covington out, has been thoroughly rustic, seldom broken by settlement; while Ohio has given us a succession of suburban towns all the way out to North Bend (482 miles) , which is a small manufacturing place, lying on a narrow bottom at the base of a convolution of gentle, wooded hills. One sees that Cincinnati has a better and a broader base; North Bend was handicapped by nature, in its early race. ”

“ Bucolic Indiana, too, within the last decade has come into the possession of gas-fields and has increased the exploitation of her coals until she seems destined to share in the industrial type represented by Ohio. Cities have arisen, like a dream, on the sites of country villages. But Indiana has a much smaller proportion of foreign elements than any other State of the Old Northwest, and it is the Southern element that still differentiates her from her sisters. While Ohio's political leaders still attest the Puritan migration, Indiana's clasp hands with the leaders from the South. ”

“ Hartsook?"
"Yes, and I want you to arrest me and try me here in Clifty."
FOOTNOTES:
[26] I have already mentioned the absence of pail and pare from the ancient Hoosier folk-speech. Brook is likewise absent. The illiterate Indiana countryman before the Civil War, let us say, had no pails, pared no apples, husked no corn, crossed no brooks. The same is true, I believe, of the South generally. As the first settlers on the Southern coast entered the land by the rivers, each smaller stream was regarded as a branch of the larger one. A small stream was therefore called a branch. ”

“ Vernon, Ind. (819 miles) , is on a high, rolling plain, with a rather pretty little court-house set in a park of grass, some good business buildings, and huge flouring-mills, which appear to be the leading industry. Another flouring-mill town, with the addition of the characteristic Kentucky distillery, is Uniontown [pg 263] (833 miles) , on the southern shore—a bright, neat little city, backed by smooth, picturesque green hills.
The feature of the day was the entrance, through a dreary stretch of clay banks, of the Wabash River (838 miles) , which divides Indiana from Illinois. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Distribution.—Southwestern Indiana, south in the Mississippi Valley to Louisiana and Texas. Known in Indiana only from one tree in Knox County on the sand ridge on the east side of what was formerly a cypress swamp, about two miles north of Decker. The soil is the Knox sand. ”

“ Indiana is unusually well served with railways, which form a veritable network of track in every part of the state. It is traversed by nearly all the great transcontinental trunk line systems, and also by important north and south lines. ”

“ Indianapolis is more civilized than Jersey City in respect to her prisons, but not with respect to her police. And I am pretty sure that, as managed by its present superintendent, the unfortunate insane are in no other State cared for as they are in the Indiana asylum, and in no other State is the appropriation for running such a noble institution so beggarly as in ours. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Southern Indiana also filled rapidly.
For a time the westward movement was regarded as of no disadvantage to the seaboard States. It was supposed that the frontier would attract a population of such character as could easily be spared in more settled communities. But it became apparent that the new country did not appeal simply to broken-down farmers, bankrupts, and ne'er-do-wells. Robust and industrious men, with growing families, were drawn off in great 99 numbers ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”