Terre Haute, Indiana

“ INDIANA, Marion County, Indianapolis, **Forest Hills Historic District, Bounded by the Monon RR tracks, Kessler Blvd., College and Northview Aves. (06/30/83)
INDIANA, Vigo County, Terre Haute, Building at 23—27 S. Sixth Street (Downtown Terre Haute MRA) , 23—27 S. 6th St. (06/30/83)
INDIANA, Vigo County, Terre Haute, Building at 510—516 Ohio Street (Downtown Terre Haute MRA) , 510—516 Ohio St. (06/30/83)
INDIANA, Vigo County, Terre Haute, Building at 810 Wabash Avenue (Downtown Terre Haute MRA) , 810 Wabash Ave. ”

“ Western Reserve far exceeds any other part of the State through which we passed, for the industry of the farmers, the convenience of roads, beauty of situation and buildings, and present flourishing situation and future prospects of improvements. The state of Indiana, on the road which we passed, is generally new and uncultivated, of a deep rich black soil, heavy timbered, rather level, more suitable for grass than grain ”

“ 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 ”

“ From the Illinois to the Wabash, excepting some little distance from the rivers, is almost one continued prairie, or natural meadow, intermixed with groves, or copses of wood, and some swamps and small lakes. These beautiful, and, to the eye of the beholder, unlimited fields, are covered with a luxuriant growth of grass, and other vegetable productions, which afford fattening and plentiful grazing for innumerable herds of buffaloe, elk, and deer. All the variety of forest trees and shrubs, common to the western country, are found in some parts of the Indiana Territory ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ They are cut down, from time to time, when the people are in want of timber; and, as a sign that they are to be felled in the next winter, a circular ring is hewn into the bark. It is said to be very difficult to cultivate the land in Indiana, on account of the extremely vigorous vegetation. Except in the vicinity of the Wabash and the White River, it is, however, not so fertile as in Illinois, where, in the environs of Springfield, for instance, it is scarcely necessary to do more than hoe the ground, in order to obtain the finest crops. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1836, alone, land sales in Indiana amounted to 3,000,000 acres and in the decade from 1840 to 1850 the population of counties bordering the new Ohio canal increased 400 per cent, while the State began to look to New York as an outlet for its products rather than to New Orleans. ”

“ Any gradual accretion of land, then, on the Indiana side of the Ohio, would belong to Indiana, and it is not very easy to distinguish between land thus formed, and land formed by the receding of the water. ”

“ What a possession for a state like Indiana, I thought—a small, quaint, wonderful Alpine region within its very center. As time went on and population increased, I thought, this would afford pleasure and recreation to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who knows, who could not afford to go farther. Plainly it had already evinced its charm to the world, for were we not on the very outskirts of two of the most remarkable curative spring resorts in America, if not in the world? Who had not heard of French Lick—West Baden? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 1926, the larger, more far sighted companies began a definite program of reforestation of their mined lands under the direction of Ralph Wilcox, at that time assistant State Forester and fortunately our State Forester today. That voluntary program was carried on until 1941 when the Indiana Coal Producers Association, the Association of the mining companies, sat down with representatives of the Indiana Department of Conservation, representing the state, and the Indiana Farm Bureau, representing the people, and drafted a bill which was enacted into law. ”

“ Forty-two thousand settlers are said to have come into Indiana in 1816, and to have raised the population to 112,000.
Letters from New York describe the condition of that state west of Utica as one of astonishing prosperity. Log cabins were disappearing, and frame and brick houses taking their place. The pike from Utica to Buffalo was almost a continuous village, and the country for twenty miles on either side was filling up with an industrious population. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Arrived at Lewis' at 6 o'clock, a distance of twenty-five miles. Passed a little village called Peola. The fact that this part of Indiana is a late purchase by the United States, accounts for its towns being so inconsiderable and being made up of log houses. The lands here are very fertile, the country mountainous and broken. Traveled twenty-five miles through woods and passed but four houses. ”

“ The Indian barrier was being pushed back, and the Sangamon country, with its land-office at Springfield, was a favorite place for settlement. The rapid increase in the amount of land sold is also striking. As the third decade of the century closed Indiana was the favorite place for frontier settlement. The sales of public lands in Ohio were diminishing. A prophetic glance would have seen that as the ever-shifting frontier passed westward Illinois was to overtake and then to far surpass Indiana in number of settlers. ”

“ Six great railroad lines pass through Terre Haute, connecting it directly with the cities of the Mississippi valley. This fact, together with its proximity to the coal-mines of Clay county, has greatly promoted its growth as a manufacturing centre. ”

“ Cultivated fruits, such as apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes and berries, are raised in large quantities for the market. The economic value of the forests was originally great, but there has been reckless cutting, and the timber-bearing forests are rapidly disappearing. As late as 1880 Indiana was an important timber-producing state, but in 1900 less than 30% of the total acreage of the state—only about 10,800 sq. ”

“ 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. ”