A brief history of Indiana
The source of Indiana’s name does not require much research to discover. Indiana’s very first inhabitants were Paleo-Indians who migrated to the region between 8000 and 6000 BCE. Then, roughly 1,100 years ago in 900 CE, Native Americans known as Mississippians migrated to Indiana and so came Indiana’s first technologically advanced civilization. The Mississippians constructed vast cities. They practiced mound-building, first for burial purposes and then for homes. Their mounds remain to this day and can be seen in numbers at Indiana’s Mounds State Park.
The entire Mississippian society disappeared from Indiana around 1450 CE. Within 150 years, there were two major Indian nations living in the Eastern Woodlands region (the area east of the Mississippi River), the Iroquois and Algonquin. Within each of these nations, there were multiple sub-nations, called tribes, who possessed common traditions and a shared history and language.
While formally semi-nomadic, the Indians that Europeans discovered in Indiana in the 1600’s resided in socially complex villages as hunters-gatherers until resource shortages would inspire relocation to a new, richer source of food, all the while maintaining their larger identity within their nation. While this structure kept Indiana’s Native Americans more rooted to the land than their forefathers and a number of the Native American tribes who lived farther west on the continent, Indiana’s pre-European peoples nonetheless had no concept of property in the European understanding. The resulting clash was at the very heart of the armed conflicts between Indians and European descendants over the next three centuries.
The first recorded history of Indiana occurred with the arrival of Europeans in the 1670’s. Most of the Native Americans the earliest Europeans in Indiana encountered were of the Miami Tribe. In terms of their larger political organization, the Miami of that time belonged to the Algonquian Nation, which also included the Delaware, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Shawnee Tribes, among others. However, the Miami were the most populous.
These first European immigrants to Indiana were French explorers, fur traders, and clergy, who quickly claimed the new land for the King of France. The French crown controlled the Indiana territory for almost a century, maintaining it especially as a source of furs, the trade for which was of vital importance to France and a primary point of emphasis in most of their colonization of the North American interior.
The French were forced to concede this resource in 1763, however, as a result of their defeat in the “French and Indian War,” a colloquial American name for the North American Theater of the wider British-French conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. The King of England’s newly won prize was to be his for only a short while, of course. A young officer in the British Army during the French and Indian War, George Washington would soon join many of his comrades in rebellion, and would later defeat of the British Crown.
Although Indiana was the scene of a key American victory against the British in the American Revolutionary War’s western theater, at the Battle of Vincennes on the Wabash River in the southern part of the state, Indiana was too sparsely populated to be a formal concern of the new Government of the United States and it did not become an official United States Territory until 1800. The resulting explosion in population soon prompted the movement toward full statehood and Indiana became the nation’s 19th state in the year 1816.
Early in its statehood, as the population continued to increase, Indiana’s natural shipping and transportation advantages began to significantly impact the nation’s cross-state trade. The extension of the National Road across Indiana during the 1830’s connected Indianapolis with the eastern part of the country. At the same time, the state began to rapidly build its own road network that better connected Indiana to the states of Michigan and Kentucky. Over the next three decades, Indiana also built an extensive railroad system and established the Wabash and Erie Canal; a man-made waterway intended to link Lake Michigan with the Ohio River.
The construction of the canal proved to be a pivotal event in Indiana history, just not in the fashion its founders intended. Like in many places, Indiana’s canal quickly became a casualty of the railroad system. However, the massive public works program for which the canal was the centerpiece-the aptly titled Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement Act-saddled the state with massive debt that was effectively unserviceable. The humiliating and financially debilitating experience fed into other sources of discontent that eventually led to the drafting and adoption of a new state constitution in 1851. The new constitution placed extensive restrictions on the state and county governments’ abilities to borrow money. Indiana’s political culture is typically defined as a naturally conservative one; many point to the early experiences with the canal, the Mammoth Improvement Act, and the resulting debt as the seed from which Hoosiers’ faith in restraint took root.
With a new constitution determining its government and politics, Indiana entered a long period of considerable national political influence. The blame for the debt crisis of the 1830s was laid at the feet of the Whig Party, who had been in control of Indiana’s government at the time. Their rapid collapse as a force in Indiana politics slightly prefaced their death as a national party. The shifting coalitions that arose from the Whigs’ decay eventually led to a new party in the nation’s West (now Midwest): the Republicans. The very first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, had spent his youth in Indiana, from 1816 to 1830. From then until early in the 19th century, it was a rare national presidential election that did not feature a Hoosier somewhere on the ticket.
The period of high political influence soon began to dovetail with rapid increases in Indiana’s prosperity. The late nineteenth century marked an economic boom in Northern Indiana with the discovery of natural gas. Manufacturing firms flocked to the areas of the state where the gas was most readily available, particularly in the state’s north central areas. The rapid industrialization of this portion of Indiana was aided by a critical economic development decision by the state: natural gas was given away free to manufacturers who located in the state.
Two industries in particular benefitted from the resource. The first was glass. The industry had existed in Indiana since the mid-nineteenth century but the discovery of gas led to rapid expansion beginning in the 1880s. By the early twentieth century, Indiana hosted 71 separate glass factories that produced one-third of the glass used in the United States. Ball State University, one of Indiana’s great education assets, is named for its hometown’s first industrial titans, the Ball Brothers, who completely dominated the industry for glass home canning jars.
The second industry was automobiles. Though hard to imagine today, there was a point in history when it was not at all clear whether America’s automobile industry would settle in Michigan or Indiana. Forty different Hoosier cities and towns had automobile manufacturing factories. Many of the most luxurious and glamorous American makes were from Indiana, not least the Dusenberg and the Auburn.
The boom times ultimately ended. The cheapness of the natural gas led to extreme wastefulness and the resource was frittered away. Regulations on sand quality in glassmaking began to impinge on the mass-produced glass market that Indiana dominated. Detroit, and especially Henry Ford, proved to be competitors that were too formidable by half. By the 1920s, it was clear, or it is at least clear in hindsight, that the fundamentals for the continuance of the state’s incredible prosperity had eroded.
The factories of that era may be gone, but an extraordinary number of Indiana’s present assets extend from the period. Certainly the one that is most difficult to miss is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, constructed in 1909 in an early marriage between Indiana’s automobile industry and competitive motor sports. The ability of automobile racing to generate posterity has made it one the state’s officially targeted industries for economic development. It is also an example of how Indiana’s automobile industry transformed, rather than disappeared. Indiana, at Detroit’s figurative doorstep, became a massive supplier to all three of General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, and this relationship continues to this day. In addition, however, Indiana’s historic legacy is leading to a gradual return of final automobile production via Asian automobile companies.
Many of the great personal wealth fortunes that were amassed by Indiana businessmen continue to shape the state in terms of former charitable gifts, public works, as well as philanthropic foundations that continue. These join with others to make Indiana, especially Central Indiana, one of the more vibrant, and fortunate centers of private philanthropic industries in the world.
As for glass, it looked only a few short years ago that the long-term legacy might not go much past the name of Ball State University. However, Indiana’s glassmaking tradition has always kept a few artisan glass makers in the state. Their presence is growing dramatically, not least in part to a program initiated by Indiana’s Governor Mitch Daniels’ administration, and managed under the leadership of Lieutenant Governor Becky Skillman: the Artisan Trail. The Artisan Trail is part innovative tourist attraction and part highly unique and creative economic development strategy that highlights Indiana’s custom artisan producers in activities such as woodworking, metalworking, wine, cheese making, and glassmaking, among many others, and then gives them more marketing potency than they have had formerly. While the program is like its targets in that it is still small and experimenting, it is also like its targets in that it has the potential to gain a wider audience because of its smartness and innovation. In the meantime, it has certainly given more life to Indiana’s glassmaking industry than it has had for many decades, albeit in a fashion the mass production industrialists of yesteryear could never have imagined.
Finally, while the natural gas that brought such wealth was wasted terribly, subsequent science led to the discovery that much more remains. Indiana today ranks as the 24th highest-producing natural gas state with a production level of 82 million cubic meters. Trenton Field, a region in East Central Indiana in which the majority of Indiana’s natural gas and oil reserves lay, also contains approximately 900 million barrels of oil.
While the natural gas and petroleum industries of today are far different from the industries of 1900, the Trenton Field’s location nonetheless is a boost to the economic vitality of modern Central Indiana, which is undergoing what some have called Indiana’s second economic renaissance (albeit late, damaged by the Great Recession). The tangible home for the prosperity of the last two decades has been Indianapolis, the state’s political capital and far and away its largest and wealthiest city. As is occasionally the case for political capitals, Indianapolis was created for that political purpose, rather than having been an existing city with enough prosperity to draw political influence.
In 1820, the Indiana General Assembly voted to move the state capital from Corydon to a site along the White River near the geographic center of the state, which would become known as Indianapolis. The state hired Alexander Ralston and Elias Pym Fordham to design the new capital city. Ralston, who had worked with Pierre L’Enfant on the design of the nation’s capital city, designed Indianapolis in the image of Washington D.C., but with an exclusively circular spoke layout. The design featured a circular commons at its center, from which radiated streets that link to cities across the nation.
The role of shipping and logistics in driving the city has largely grown ever since and is now at its greatest level of vitality. It just completed a new airport that compliments the city’s role as a global leader in air shipping (Federal Express’ second largest hub is Indianapolis). It also enjoys a new intermodal-shipping center that links the airport, rail, and, via rail, a deep water port on Lake Michigan. This is in addition to its standing sources of transportation advantage over the last half century: interstate highways. Four interstate highways connect in Indianapolis: I-65, I-69, I-70, and I-74, with a fifth in nascent consideration. There are also six U.S. highways that intersect in Indianapolis, which are the second highest class of public road: U.S. 31, U.S. 36, U.S. 40 (the old National Road), U.S. 52, U.S. 136, and U.S. 421. The number of Interstate and other highway connections has given Indianapolis the nickname “The Crossroads of America.”
Indianapolis’ status as a life sciences capital has evolved over many years. Eli Lilly and Co., now a pharmaceutical giant, grew out of a company that initially made insulin, various medical devices, and profitable production of certain generic drugs. Its status as a global leader was permanently cemented with its discovery and sales of Prozac. The Indiana University School of Medicine, located in Indianapolis, has also gradually evolved into global leadership. It is now the second largest medical school in the nation. Its growth has, in turn, helped to drive the evolution of Central Indiana’s status as a premier healthcare providers’ center. The complex of which the I.U. Medical School is a part of-Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis-includes a 30,000 student university, a nursing school, the medical school, the Indiana University hospital, the famed Riley Children’s Hospital, with yet another full-service hospital in the beginning stages of construction. These strengths in healthcare research and delivery-helped Indianapolis flourish as a healthcare finance center. WellPoint, the nation’s second largest health insurer, is based in Indianapolis.
The growth of these economic centers in Indianapolis help to tell the story of Indiana in the post-World War II period. It is very much a story with two parts. The first part is the difficult tale of the continuing erosion of the labor needs of manufacturers. Indiana has fared this transition better than most states; a higher percentage of its workforce spends its days in manufacturing than is true for any other state. However, that fact is a result of concerted leadership and economic development efforts to compensate for the effects of innovation and globalization, rather than some Brigadoonish reality in which Indiana’s manufacturers never sought to join the rest of the world’s highly productive manufacturing capabilities.
There have also been industrial changes from which a happy ending is hard to find. The steel industry in northwest Indiana, which once seemed to drive employment for practically a whole corner of the state, now employs a fraction of its former labor rolls and the surrounding region has been unable to recover. Many small towns are like mini-examples of the stasis that affects the larger steel economy in northwestern Indiana.
Yet, as Indianapolis attests, there is another, very happy story. The growth of life sciences has brought new levels of prosperity and not just to Indianapolis. Warsaw, Indiana, a small town near the far north of the state, hosts two world class medical device manufacturers, Zimmer and Biomet, that have driven regional employment growth that is a rare combination of stable and dramatic. Columbus, Indiana, after the recession of the early 1980s nearly brought it to its knees, pursues an unusual and ultimately highly successful strategy to diversify not outside of manufacturing and into services but rather within manufacturing. The result has attracted manufacturers from all over the world to the point that the small city of roughly 50,000 people sometimes feels like a mini manufacturing United Nations. It is certainly not at all recognizable as a place where the unemployment plight of 25 years ago brought attention from the national media.
In its way, Columbus’ success in attracting foreign manufacturers may be the best sign for Indiana’s future. Indiana is a manufacturing state. It has thought of itself as a manufacturing state ever since the natural gas and railroads coalesced to bring Hoosiers off their farms and into towns big and small throughout the state. Manufacturing has driven its periods of prosperity. If the rest of the state can follow Columbus or Indianapolis’ lead in attracting foreign automobile producers such as the new Honda plant in the small town of Greensburg, Indiana, then prosperity will likely follow.
Sagamore Institute
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