- Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this evening devoted to Monroe County history and particularly
- a discussion, a panel discussion by a group of people who are engaged in writing a new history of Monroe
- County. I am Paul Lucas from the Department of History at Indiana and I will introduce the panelists
- starting on the far right, Rose McElveen from the IU News Bureau and also a regular
- columnist for the Herald Times. Ken Owen, a freelance writer, rock and tour, and Indiana historian.
- Pam Service, who is a member of the city council and is also the Monroe County historian and the curator
- at the Monroe County Museum. Jim Madison, my colleague from the IU history department and editor of
- the Indiana magazine of history. And Donna Ray, who is a
- a student of history and a writer of history and someone who we're happy to welcome to work with the
- rest of us. Also, several people are not here tonight, or at least one that I know of, who will be working
- with us, and that is Bruce Herrick Conforth, who is the archivist at Indiana University. And I might
- also mention that we have lost one member who was working with us.
- Tim Sayre, Timothy Sayre who was with the IU budget office and unfortunately or fortunately for Tim
- is leaving to become director of campus planning at IU Kokomo. Tim was with us for about a year and
- regretfully is going to take a better job and so will leave the work to us.
- The format for this evening, and I hope that the members of the audience will feel free to join in.
- This is a panel discussion in which the audience is welcome to chime in at any time. I can see most
- of you. There are thousands of you out there, and I welcome you on an evening when there are tornado
- warnings. There are so many tornadoes out there that apparently they're running into each other, but
- I welcome you at any rate, and I'm happy you came out to talk and listen to words of wisdom about Monroe County.
- What we're going to do is I have a series of questions in front of me, and I'll throw these questions
- out to the panelists, and we'll use those questions as a basis for discussion. And as I said, please
- feel free to enter in. If at the end of the hour or so we have any time left, why, we'll open the session
- up for questions and answers. Very quickly, this project has been, I guess, stewing and fomenting, if
- that's a word,
- I'm fomenting. I guess it's been in the hopper for the last couple of years. And it was occasioned by
- the Monroe County Historical Society's publication of a book of family history, which is out and is
- available. And it was decided by the members of the society that they would very much like to see a
- new history of Monroe County written.
- And several of us were volunteers, primarily. We volunteered and we brought in other volunteers along
- the way. And I must say that we've been working slowly, but hopefully carefully and measuredly in preparing
- to get this project underway. We've been greatly aided by the support of the society and the support
- of the community, and also by support from the Indiana Humanities Council through an Indiana Heritage
- Research Grant, which has carried us
- through this past year and is about to expire. So we've had a lot of support and I must say there's
- been a lot of enthusiasm. The book is hopefully will be published in about three years. And the IU Press
- has indicated that they will do the publication. So we're very enthusiastic about that and that takes
- care of one of the questions that I'm going to throw out. And I might as well complete that question
- by saying,
- that at this time we're talking about 250 pages long that will include many pictures as well as text,
- be of coffee table size and probably cost in the neighborhood of $25. And I'm sure if you'd like to
- put in an early order why the IU Press would be happy to take that order. Well, let's move right on
- to a discussion of the book and of the problem of writing local history and of the whys and wherefores of
- Monroe County. So I'm going to throw out this first question to the panel, and as soon as I see them
- wearing out, I'll move on to a second question. Panel, why do you think it's important for us to know
- and understand our history as a county? Does anybody want to? Rose, go ahead. This is certainly not
- original. Somebody else said it, and it may be a paraphrase of it, but I firmly believe that if we don't
- know where we came from, we don't know who we are.
- I think our history gives us a important sense of identity, which a community like Bloomington needs,
- because we are such a transit community. There's so many people coming in and out all the time. We need
- a real persona that people, when they come in, can recognize and identify with quickly. And that comes
- out of our history. You both have raised interesting points. Can you give a specific instance of where
- knowing history Monroe County might make a difference to someone who's like myself who's been here for
- 22 years or someone who's been here for just 22 days. Well from the practical standpoint it's just kind
- of nice to know the cast of characters when you drop into a location and some of the past cast of characters
- but the past also helps us to explain what's going on now and helps us to understand it better.
- Excuse me, go ahead, Pam. Just being on the city council, I see sort of the other end of the thing.
- But I think it's really important for people to have a sense of what their community is. We have a lot
- of times where there are major development proposals that come up before the city. And oftentimes people
- will get up and say, well, it's changing the character of our community. But in order to argue that
- strong in one way or another, you have to know what the character of the community is.
- That has grown out of an historical, biological kind of process. If you're going to decide where you
- want the community to go, in very concrete development, zoning or whatever terms, you have to know where
- it has been and why it's the way it is now. That's a good point. You said zoning. I'll throw this out
- at you. I don't know whether you can answer it, but does Monroe County have a strong history of zoning?
- Is that an Indiana tradition?
- No, no, and that might explain why it's a problem now, isn't it? Right, exactly. I think of right away
- of the movie Breaking Away and what that must have looked like to people outside. Here's Bloomington
- and the cutters and the university and all that loveliness, but behind that was a very, very old Monroe
- County story of class differences, right? Am I correct?
- Maybe I'm not correct. Oh, no. Are you correct? Of course you are. You're an historian. I couldn't be
- wrong. Historians are by nature correct, otherwise they wouldn't be writing history, which is why I
- am not an historian. No, it is an old story, but it is a story that seems to run counter to our Hoosier
- myth of equality and of having a classless society that we all, all of us Hoosiers
- are created free and equal, and no one person is any less or any better than any other. But Steve Tesich,
- who of course didn't know about such things because he was born in Yugoslavia, grew up in Lake County
- and then came to college in Bloomington, perceived a certain set of inequalities, which he was so bold
- as to turn into a screenplay. And yes, it does challenge.
- a great many things we like to think about ourselves, that we do not, in fact, have social and economic
- differences that separate one person from another into classes. This is delightful. Hoosier myth and
- indeed is an extension of the American myth about the American dream. But like so many other things
- about what we presume to call geology or rather reality, there is a geology, layers and layers.
- of years and perceptions and personal histories that underlie this surface that we're exploring. Ken,
- I think you've put your finger, you may not be a historian, but you've certainly put your finger, maybe
- your whole fist right now, on I think an interesting aspect. You mentioned the American dream of equality
- and opportunity, and then you related that specifically to the movie Breaking Away, where you see the
- difference between the university, the affluent university community,
- and the so-called cutters who graduate from high school and then face an uncertain future, clearly without
- the opportunities that the, and I remember particularly the juxtaposition, if I may use that word, between
- the leading bicyclist and his girlfriend on the university campus who was a sorority girl. Excuse me,
- go ahead. Without diminishing the accomplishments of the author of that screenplay, at some point in time,
- It might be worthwhile, gently, to say that the term cutter is incorrect. Townspeople are counties or
- stonies, but not cutters. Well, Tesich was dealing with the Serbian word for the oppressed underclass,
- the proletariat, which is kuta. And I don't know whether that's Serbian or Croat. It's one or the other.
- Maybe Montenegrin. Well, you can't expect an outsider to get it all right. No, no, and he never had.
- With that as a background, let me throw this at my colleague, Jim Madison, as a historian. Why is local
- history important, Jim? I mean, I have to answer it. Who else has already put me in that position? Well,
- I think I can pick up on things that have already been said there, particularly by Pam Service, and
- maybe begin by reminding you of the phenomenon of roots, now maybe 10 years ago. And I think that did
- strike a chord, not only in the black community, but across America.
- That's a genuine court. A human need to be connected, to have some room, some sense of place. There's
- a lot of talk these days about a global society and a global economy, even to the point where now our
- Indiana politicians are convinced that there's a world beyond the borders of Indiana, which they weren't
- for the first 170 years or so of this state's history.
- And of course, yes, we are a part of an international and global economy and society and culture. But
- we all know, and those of us who've lived for any length of time in a place know, the important ways
- in which we are connected locally. And I think that sense of place is terribly important. I think it's
- inevitable that one develops that sense of place as one lives in a community, as one ages and matures.
- One of the things I would hope this book would do, and one of the things I hope local history does,
- is to help speed up that process of development, particularly for younger people, even in the schools,
- in the public schools, and younger people in their 20s and 30s who move to Bloomington, who are going
- to, if they stay here, develop roots in a sense of place. But I hope this book, this local history,
- will help that process
- occur more quickly and help those roots set a little deeper and the tree flower a little more to carry
- the imagery. So that's, I think that's why local history is important. The second reason I think it's
- important is because it's fun and that's sometimes a good enough reason to do some things. You mentioned
- the, you mentioned, well I have a question later on down the line about who this book might have
- this book would appeal so maybe I'll just hold off on that but let me move on very to the next phase
- and that is to talk about the history that exists and some of you can comment on this what's wrong with
- the history we already know that is what's wrong with what we know about Monroe County isn't it enough
- I mean there are a couple of books on Monroe County what what's wrong with that stuff yeah Rose well
- first of all we haven't
- We haven't had any history written since the one that was in the early 1900s, and a great deal has happened
- to Bowman since then, and we need to cover that area. As to the quality of those histories, they were what
- what could be called in the publishing industry, quick and dirty. They were commercial publishing firms.
- There were a fair number of them in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They brought a troop of research
- gophers to Bloomington who did a quick survey of the history, collected as much as they could,
- made no real effort, as far as I can tell, to verify the facts then, the dates and so forth, and slapped
- them together. And one other comment in relation to the vanity biographies. There's always a heading
- on those, no matter what county you're looking at, that says prominent people in the county.
- There were a lot of prominent people not in the book for the very simple reason they were unwilling
- to pay to have their names, their biographies put in the book. So they're very stylized. If you go to
- the Monroe County Library to the Indiana Room and you take a look upstairs at what they're like, they're
- very stylized. And in my estimation, they're incredibly dull.
- I agree with your estimation. They're good resource material. I mean, if you're doing some research,
- they list the people who bought land in each little township at a certain time. And you can earn the
- biographical material. That which is there is interesting. If you happen to be doing some research on
- an area where a character that who paid to have his biography in there is there, it's good basic material.
- But I don't think we really had what we do and we know
- consider a history book. I don't think we ever really have had one, one that sits back and analyzes
- and takes a look at the big picture and puts the details into that picture. So it's, I mean, it's more
- than time that we did have one and we are the seat of the state university and we don't even have a
- history of ourselves. You're absolutely right and the 19th century history is
- were large, they were money making operations, they were ego centered in that they were designed to
- flatter the egos of the people that they served. Your comment though is about their accuracy is interesting.
- Is that generally true? Are most of these histories reliable? My sense is that they vary considerably.
- But are the Monroe County histories pretty good as far as
- Or has anyone really tested them to find out? They're the only source in some cases. I just wonder.
- When I've been writing Looking Back articles, I have sometimes bounced the material of the history,
- say, against the census figures and census rules to be on the safe side. Or I have gone down to the
- clerk's office and taking a look at some of the court cases to verify dates and the names of people
- and so forth. Well, I think you're absolutely right in that the comments, both good and bad, about these
- histories, and I think I might add another comment, and that is to say that the big picture you mentioned
- is certainly missing from those books. There's no effort to do any of the kinds of things that we've
- been talking that local history should do.
- either tell the story of the people or to relate that story to the big picture. For example,
- you can read the, and I've read parts of what's available and you'll find no mention of the industrial
- revolution in the United States. You'll certainly find no mention of race as a factor or a problem.
- You'll find no mention of hardly any of the kinds of things that we cover at the university in our freshman
- surveys. And you wonder,
- I mean, we clearly write a different kind of history today than they did in those days. Ken, you? Well,
- it occurs to me that the popular, commercially sponsored histories of the late 19th century are very
- revealing for several reasons, chief among them, that they present an idealized portrait of the county
- in many cases for the purposes of economic development.
- This is a matter of recruiting a local college, a local factory, persuading immigrants to come here
- and set up shop and settle. So that in many ways, local and county histories do in fact present de-portrait
- that has been touched up, that the warts have been removed in many cases,
- that the lighting is a little better, that the dark spots are touched up or lightened up. And in effect,
- then, the history of Monroe County that we have from the late 19th century is what the Monroe Countians
- of the day, at least those who were paying for it, wanted to have. Wanted to have said about themselves,
- about their community. And that is instructive. That gives us some idea, I think, of what kind
- of values, of what ideals, if you will, of what sense of community those persons wished to project to
- a larger readership. I'd like to suggest that maybe we ought to do the different here because when I
- have four cars ahead of me at a four-way stop sign and when I get in other moments and when I think
- that Bloomington is growing too rapidly and becoming too big, maybe we want to write a history that
- makes Bloomington look like a dreadful place so no one else comes here.
- I distributed it widely. That's the Oregon approach to the writing of history. Exactly. When Kent was
- talking about the warts being removed from some of the county history, it reminds me of... In looking
- back articles, I have touched on two or three occasions on the serious problem we had on the white cappers.
- And for those who don't know who white cappers were, they were self-appointed attitude adjusters. And
- if indeed people, they didn't think people behaved in the right way, they visited them in the middle
- of the night and switched them very badly or whipped them or whatever. And you don't see that in either
- one of the earlier county histories. And it certainly was a problem here. And it was part of, it was
- not unique to Monroe County.
- But it's certainly something that we should not overlook. Well, that moves me right into my next question,
- which is what should our history include? And I think both your comment, Kent's comment, and Jim's all
- bear on these. Should we write a book that includes the warts and all? That is, should we tell
- Should we tell a balanced story, even if it doesn't make us look so good? After all, Monroe County is
- growing quickly, there are businesses coming in, new people. Do we want to talk about a sordid history
- of vice and racism and political corruption or whatever that we might find? Maybe you just want to track
- it. And do we have the pictures to go with it? I got a few, I got a few.
- I think if we're going to pretend that this is history, we have to do that. We have to be honest. And
- it's certainly... Chicago, I don't think, is hurt by the image of what happened in the 30s and the gangster.
- I mean, it's growing like Topsy anyway. And we don't have that sort of extremes. I mean, we're not talking
- about major character flaws or anything of that nature. We're talking about the sort of thing that happened
- in any other community in the United States.
- But if we don't incorporate these things in with the rest of history, we're not being honest. It isn't
- history. It's just like the vanity stuff from the last century. Excuse me. Jim? Well, I think the earlier
- histories were excluded. They excluded certain kinds of people, excluded certain kinds of subjects.
- And I think this history needs to be inclusive, to be as wide and embracing as it possibly can be.
- reaching out and incorporate into the story of this particular place all the people that we know lived
- here and still live here and all the kinds of activities and behaviors and ideas that they had and that
- human beings everywhere have and any other kind of history is a history that really is hard to take
- seriously for an intelligent reader. We had a comment from the audience I think. I disagree with this
- self-appointed business of the flight captains. Now in
- Bowen County, right after the Civil War, there were elections of committees of each of the townships
- to appoint regulators who were to, because I believe Paul Lewis mentioned in a lecture last year at
- Mathers Museum that we had a problem all over the United States concerning laws. We certainly had it
- here in Bloomington,
- You can't confuse the pro-Southern, which were the Knights of the Golden Circle, and headed in Indiana
- by a man named William A. Bowles, a French slave. Now, he was a colonel in the Mexican War, had very
- powerful friends in this country, and one of his closest friends was Jefferson Davis.
- there are quite a bit of correspondence concerning between the two. Now, he was arrested during the
- Civil War for treason, and was going to be executed. And Abraham Lincoln commuted his sentence
- to imprisonment in the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. Well, he was released after the war and
- went back to French Lake and so forth.
- He was certain that the whole Southern, his second wife, or maybe it had been his third, because he
- had been divorced several times, was a Kentucky woman. And they brought seven slaves to Fred's state.
- And they were named slaves, but that's the way things were. Now, here in Bloomington, we had a pro-South
- led by Cornelius Varsan, who was a slave catcher, along with two carceral brothers. Now, it ties into
- this white cavern
- The white campers in Bloomington and Monroe County were the same type of thing of regulators as in Owen
- County. We see things concerning the Wild West. There were people who took up, instead of get small
- business. Now, the white campers in Bloomington were led by ex-Guggen soldiers, some of them officers.
- vegans on that particular control wall that was certainly quite notorious nationally, when the crook
- Mershon and bougie Mershon were arrested for murdering an itinerant who had come to the Bloomington
- and got quite drunk. And I think you find in the Theodore C. Wiley journal that he mentions
- but that wasn't where he was committed. He should have said it was Oscar Souther's, Wainer's, who was
- connected. However, there were certainly what the opposite Wiley, he said, he might have said, good
- bet and rinse the bad rubbish, and that underlaid what he said. People down in New Albany,
- That seems to me, if you will permit the interruption, an important point about the underlying strain
- of populism throughout the whole history of the state.
- and that populism in some cases produced the excesses of the Klan in the late teens and 1920s, but also
- the excesses of the white cappers and the other regulators earlier in the state's history, but these
- are not necessarily identical, but they are aspects of the same kind of popular movement, the same kind
- of urge to have the people take charge, lest
- government fall into the hands of elected public officials. I think that's right. Is that right Jim?
- Absolutely right. Absolutely right. I know that the white campers died out in the teams. I know that
- one of the last things mentioned in the NAPA's news was terribly anti-Loomington and the university
- would be always shipped up there. But they were
- incessantly putting down moving them in editorials where certain things happened, tipping particularly
- to white capping, which happened all over the country in certain forms. But we could have had the last
- laugh, but our papers kept still when an incident of white capping happened in Annapolis, and the Washington
- Democrat, the Washington-Diana Democrat, really lambasted Indianapolis if we hadn't last come up with it.
- I always thought that the nursing lobby couldn't end a white camping because of defamation of character.
- Al, what can we do or what should we do about the fact along the line of what we've been talking about
- of stories that have not been told properly? Many local histories are notorious for being histories
- of the rich and the famous.
- and chronicles of the activities of the well-born and the well-bred. How are we going to handle that?
- Well, that's a tough one. I think any historian with his or her salt today is convinced of the necessity
- of doing that. The question is, how do you do that? How do you write this inclusive history?
- how do you write what is sometimes called history from the bottom up, or the history of ordinary people,
- or the history of everyday life, which is something I think, as I say, every historian wants to do,
- and something that distinguishes historians in the late 20th century from historians 100 years or so
- ago. There are ways, techniques, and methods that have been developed to do that. None of them provides
- the absolute key
- to doing any of that. One particular kind of technique or method is statistical analysis. And we do
- have statistical data from Monroe County, particularly from the U.S. Census reports, but from other
- reports as well. And so we can say things about infant mortality rates, for example, which are one of
- my favorite pieces of statistical data because they tell us a great deal, not only about how many babies
- died before they reached their first birth date, and Donna Rae can tell us even more about this,
- But that reflects a much broader sense of the quality of health care and really the quality of life
- in a particular place. So we have statistical data. We have oral history interviews for the recent past.
- Some of those have been done, some of them 10 or more years ago, I guess. But it's a tough question.
- We have photographs which help.
- There's no single answer to it. When I was going through the museum collection, pulling out photographs
- that I thought might work into this book, and we are talking about a heavily photographic kind of book,
- I was trying to focus in on ones that showed what life was like at a given time, a given place, rather
- than pictures of leading citizens sitting there in front of the photographer looking stuff, or pictures
- of major buildings, just the building.
- You know, this guy is important. People in front of it, cars, you know, something that gives it sort
- of a snapshot of a life kind of a look. And I think that will help, too, if we are selective in the
- photographs that really show it. Sometimes it's hard to do that because the things you really want to
- have pictures of, nobody thought of taking a picture of. You know, just the family sitting around after
- dinner, you know, listening to the radio. You know, I don't have pictures like that, but that made up
- a lot of people's lives.
- But in some cases you have ones that come close in on that. We've got some individual people pictures
- that I pulled out. I tried again to stay away from individuals just standing there, but this is a neat
- picture of Daniel Kirkwood and Theophilus Wiley and Reverend Minton in the First Presbyterian Church
- standing there, obviously a totally candid picture in front of a
- railroad car, arguing apparently about something. It's an interesting picture, even though it's important,
- people, it has a little life to it. But here's a picture of the Nury Fourth of July parade, the mirror
- company just going down the street with just ordinary employees of the company sitting there on the float.
- There's pictures in schools of kids just sitting around their school desks. This is the sort of thing
- that I hope we can highlight. Some people are going to ask us, is this just going to be another history
- of the university? How are we going to answer that? I don't think you can separate the history of the
- university from the history of the Wilmington community or from the Northern County.
- What has been done in the past is that the university has been set off in its own section in the history.
- Is there a story to be told about the university that has not been told? And maybe you put your finger
- on it, Rose. You say it's been, we have Tom Clark's magnificent volumes on the university. But is the
- story of the university in the Monroe County setting, has that been told? Let's say the relationship
- between the university and the communities.
- I don't think the impact of the University and the community has ever really been told. And of course,
- since the time of the last history up until now, the impact has been enormous. And I think that's one
- way in which it could be approached. I wrote an irate letter to the editor in the local paper of, oh,
- it's been six weeks, eight weeks ago in which the author
- talks about the wage structure in Monroe County and says that, well, everyone knows that the wages are
- low in Monroe County because the university won't pay anything and everyone else takes their cue from
- the university. Now is that, I won't ask you to comment on the veracity of that, but this person wrote
- it and said, everyone knows that. Well, I didn't know that. I mean, I was,
- I mean, that's not something that we talk about at the breakfast table. But that certainly would be
- a kind of relationship between community and university that would be worth exploring, wouldn't it?
- Well, Paul, it's the relationship between university knowledge and common knowledge, or university knowledge
- and common sense, what we the people hold to be self-evident and certain home truths that may not have
- penetrated the confines of the old Dunn farm.
- It seems to me that a large part of what makes Monroe County and Bloomington in particular distinctive
- must be centered in Indiana University, its history, its legends, its mystique. Especially when one
- moves the perspective from which one views this area, this history, from the place itself to a transcendent location.
- so that we take into account what Tokyo thinks of Indiana University, what Berlin or Paris or Rome or
- Rio may think of Indiana University. And very often, those locations, the persons there, think of it
- in relation to the Kinsey Institute, to the School of Music, to a timid young man the name of Robert
- Montgomery Knight, or a coach with the name of Jim Councilman. They may think of it in relation to
- Herman Muller or Herbert Muller may think of it in relation to the late lamented School of Letters to
- a great many things that are directly connected to Indiana University. For that reason, I think what
- may make us singular, if not altogether unique, will be in many ways Indiana University. We are not
- limited, however,
- as a culture, as a society, by whatever Indiana University has produced and bestowed upon us. I think
- that that is the important thing, that the history of Monroe County must be seen as considerably richer,
- more expansive, and livelier than what the university culture would provide. Does that overstate the
- case? No, I think along the same line I'll ask the question, the next quite the obvious question,
- dwelt on Bloomington and Monroe and the University, what about the rest of the county? Are we going
- to write a history of Bloomington or are we going to write a history of the county? Yeah, I think we
- are going to write a history of the county. And I think to follow from Kent, we're really going to try
- to, I hope, juggle three balls and interweave them. One, the university, two, the city of town, the
- city of Bloomington, and three, the whole county from Harrisburg and Smithville to Alexville and all
- the farms and folks in between.
- And I don't think we can go about doing that by segregating and separating. I don't think we can have.
- I hope we're not gonna have a chapter on the university and a chapter on the county and a chapter on
- Bloomington. It'd be easier to do that. It'd be much easier to do that. But I think the far better way
- to do it is to integrate it and to bring forth the connections.
- because they really are connected, all three of those places. The folks who live in Harrodsburg often
- end up working at the university or in Bloomington. And there are all sorts of other ways in which the
- connections and relationships are there. And I think the challenge for us up here is to find
- those connections and bring them forth. As was pointed out, there already are quite adequate histories
- of the university. And we don't really want to repeat that. We don't need to list when each new president
- came on and when this and that faculty expanded.
- What we need to know is when these things affected the community as a whole. Like when Wells became
- chancellor and president, that had a major effect on the community. Because the effect he had on the
- university was to tremendously expand the directions it went, the size, the student body, everything
- else. And that is something that we need to bring out.
- That transition in the time of the university hasn't affected the community, but there are a lot of
- things in the history of the university that don't really make any more difference than in the history
- of any individual family, which is important to the family, but its impact on the community is negligible.
- So I agree, I think maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to have a separate university chapter, but integrate
- all of that together.
- Is there, along the same line I was just thinking, is there something or are there anything unique about
- Monroe County that would make it stand out among all the counties in Indiana or whatever? I mean, is
- there any particular reason why someone would want to pick up our book and read just to learn something
- that they might not find in the history of Shelby County or Warren County, Iowa or such
- For example, the university, I'm sure, has shaped the growth of Bloomington in ways that most probably
- people don't realize. For example, I'm thinking of some research that another member of the history
- department directed a couple of years ago, in which they found in the census of 1880 and 1900 in there,
- strictly 1880, they found in a small community like Bloomington, they found that the literacy was above
- the national average, the number of years of school, and there were all kinds of things that indicated
- a community that was very closely tied to what was then a very small university. The fact that almost
- every home had at least one university student living in it. And then compare that with a county at
- that time, which were where the
- where the number of years attended at school was way below the average, and the income was way below
- the average. So it was, go ahead, Rose, you wanted to make a comment. I was just gonna say that I'm
- not sure I can answer your question about what makes Monroe County absolutely unique, but when I think
- about Bloomington, and we might as well say the county as well, there's this,
- There's a strange contradiction between the university as a cosmopolitan community within a larger community
- that is not cosmopolitan. There are two other thoughts that occur to me about the relationship to the
- university. I suspect the statistics would indicate that we have a fairly high number of university
- graduates in this community for the very simple reason of the convenience
- of the university's presence. Another thing that occurs to me is that World War II was a watershed as
- far as the growth of the university was concerned, and it was the GI Bill that suddenly, the university
- just suddenly burst at the seams, and we started building buildings to keep up with it.
- What Pam was saying, you know, we don't need a separate chapter, but what we need is these relationships
- because obviously as the university increased in size, the community, the merchants, the number of merchants
- increased because of the demand for them. I don't know if there's really anything that's really outrageously
- unique about Monroe County. The combination might be unique. There are many communities that have large
- universities. There are other communities that have
- uh... major uh... industries that rely on natural resources such as limestone in our case. There are
- others that may have had, you know, big furniture factories or something like that. But the combination
- we have is somewhat unique. But not that outrageously unique. Not that people would say, you know, this
- community is just so fantastically different. We have to search out a book on it. I think that in some
- ways that's good. I think that what we've got here is on the whole a fairly typical American community
- with its own little
- So I think that allows us to focus in on what makes a typical American community rather than focusing
- in on what is aberrant about the community. In some, if you're doing history of some communities, you'd
- end up focusing in on that particular feature that everybody associates with. Even if it were, say,
- like at the confluence of two major rivers, you'd end up focusing your, that would be the theme of your
- history. The crossroads of America or whatever.
- And you'd lose a lot of the ordinary stuff that people were living every day. I thought of something
- unique. Monroe County was the center of population in the United States and that center of population
- was found to be a snake-infested briary picket in the Benton Township until business and
- scientific it's uh... uh... recalculated discovered that it was now rose knows where she speaks just
- as last weekend i thought when they and i can't decide as a pollitzer prize-winning reporter who during
- his days on the a herald telephone late and lamented uh... did a piece on the
- of the center of population. And according to him, it was placed on the near west side in an almost
- entirely black neighborhood. And that the city fathers decided that this was too much of an indignity
- for such a marker to have to bear up on her. So they moved it downtown to the courthouse lawn,
- or thereabouts. And that it was a racist matter, not a matter of brambles and thickets and swamps.
- This is a matter we'll have to sort out, quite obviously. But I do want to take exception, if I may,
- not just to Ms. McElvine, but to Ms. Sears, on the uniqueness or the singularity of Monroe County and
- Bloomington. For all of the things that we seem to have in common with other Midwestern or at least
- southern Midwestern counties, I believe there are factors
- that do set us apart. Almost to the point, if we are not utterly unique, or just unique, you can't qualify
- unique, we are quite different. Pam may not see it this way because she is a Californian, which has
- to be taken into account. This will not impugn her motives, but it will say something about her perspective
- on the mind run of humanity. I think that we are at a point of confluence between
- cosmopolitan university elite culture, if you will, and a down-home Hoosier culture, and that that confluence
- or conflict or clash has produced some very interesting results. If one talks about this place with
- persons from other parts of the world, as I have rather insistently, not deliberately, but insistently,
- I am amused and very often surprised by what comes up about us, that there is a Bloomington Mystique,
- or if you expand it to the edges of the county, a Monroe County Mystique. We are a musical center not
- simply because of the Beaux-Arts train, or because of Janis Stark, or because of the riches of the School of Music,
- We are a center because of John Cougar Melon Camp, because of Sheila Stevens, because of a very active
- rhythm and blues and rock and roll and home industry, almost cottage industry recording business around
- here. We are known for our music and we are known in Liverpool and we are known in Yokohama.
- We are known in some parts of the world because of a rich literary culture, which may have begun with
- the publication of the new Purchase to scandalize local society, but which was certainly evident in
- the works of James Woodburn as a popular historian, which certainly picked up 40 years ago with the
- publication of Ross Lotridge's Rain Tree County. And today we have authors, poets, essayists, novelists living
- and working right here in Monroe County. James Alexander Thom is a good example of a local colorist,
- a writer who uses the area and exploits it marvelously well. Are you exploiting the area in outer space
- and interstate space? Well, now I am, yes. I've got three books that say right here and here. The point
- that I would make, whether it has to do with PCBs,
- whether it has to do with the Indiana University basketball team or swimming team or track team, whether
- it has to do with the School of Levitts, whether it has to do with this place, we have created about
- ourselves a mystique. And we are perceived in ways that Martinsville is not perceived or even Columbus
- is perceived, although Columbus has its own mystique, which is worth considering.
- What I submit is, and this is a matter that I intend to investigate closely, trying to ward
- off sentimentality on one hand and just share fraudulence on the other, I am eager to know what accounts
- for how we are perceived, how we are understood as a community. And many of those things are not simply
- reducible to the census returns or who lived in what neighborhood when or what the relative
- incomes were. Many of these things have to do with the star-dusted lyrics of Hoagy Carmichael. Many
- of them have to do with the Book Nook and the Bent Eagles. A lot of them have to do with the down hominess
- of William Lowe Bryan. But they also have a reality. Well, I don't know whether or not we have that
- kind of an aura around us.
- But my perception is that Monroe County has most of the major elements of the American story in it,
- as opposed to, I don't want to pick on Warren County, Iowa, but I know Warren County, Iowa, and Warren
- County, Iowa doesn't have all the elements of the American story. But there's agriculture here. There
- is the high culture, low culture split that you note.
- There's industry, the Industrial Revolution, there's class, there's race, there's progress, there's
- small homogenous communities, there's diversity, and we have to, I think we have to keep in mind that
- thousands of IU alums are going to read our book and are going to remember that they were nurtured here
- also, so we have lots.
- I have to put that in, in case the audience is getting a sense that we're anti-IU. We're certainly not.
- But this is, I think, a very good story to tell, and a story that, while there may not be a uniqueness
- here, certainly, and there may well be a uniqueness. We'll figure that out. We may have two books. But
- certainly, it's a story that people ought to read, because I think it's a very American, very typical
- American story. Well, we're getting a little short on time, and there are a couple of other things that
- I wanted to cover before we gave up.
- The next item, obviously, who is going to read this new book? Is it going to be an academic book full
- of footnotes and academic jargon like infrastructure and high culture, low culture, and things like
- that? Or are we going to write a popular book that has pop-up cartoons and things like that? What are
- we going to do? Rose? Scratch and snoop. I have an absolutely marvelous book at home that some of you
- might have heard of that's called 1066 and all that.
- It's sort of a classic, and it has, in the introduction, it has this statement, history is not what
- you thought, it is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself. And I'd like to make plea
- for a readable history that when people have put it down, they've not used it only for reference, but
- they will put it down with some knowledge that they have absorbed.
- because I have enjoyed it. That's important. Yeah, I think that's quite... I agree with you very strongly,
- Rose, and I think that means that there's a cost to that kind of history, and I'm willing to pay that
- cost and to admit it up front, at least for my own purpose here, that this book will not be a reference
- book. You won't be able to pull it off the shelf and find the name of every family,
- of every church, the date the church was founded, the schools listed by names. I don't think it's going
- to have that kind of detailed reference purpose. You may find the answers to some questions. There'll
- be an index and you can look in the index and it may provide answers to some questions. But I hope it's
- going to be a book that rather than serves that kind of reference function is going to serve the kind
- of function that Rose is talking about, a book that can be read.
- and that can be absorbed and can help to create these kinds of roots and understandings of place. I've
- got to tell you how many times people have come into the museum and to our gift shop there and said,
- I'm looking for a book about Bloomington to send home to my mother for Christmas. And there just isn't
- one. And I think that there is a built-in market for people out there. There's a constantly turning
- over market. Every four years, totally new people are here.
- looking for something to send to the relatives for Christmas about the town where they are spending,
- you know, four years or eight years or whatever of their lives. And it's not just for the people coming
- into the university, but it's something that all of us have at some point wanted something like that
- and it just is not available. Last week I was several weeks ago actually on the gift committee to buy
- gifts for our sister city delegation,
- 13 people from Luchow, Taiwan. And we wanted to buy a whole bunch of books with lots of pictures and
- stuff that would show them something about the city that they had formed this alliance with. And there
- just wasn't anything available that really gave a good flavor of what Bloomington and Monroe County
- are like. I think that's what we need, not an academic detailed reference book.
- but something that gives a good overview that people can read and look at the pictures and come away
- with a much better grounding in where we're from. I might add, by the way, for those of you who are
- watching this program, and the thousands of people who are here will barely be accommodated by all the
- seats, but they've been very quiet, that the profits from this book are not going to go to our pockets.
- The money that this group is going to receive
- The money that this group is going to receive will probably barely cover the cost of typing paper, but
- the purpose of the book is to raise money for the Monroe County Historical Society and specifically
- to establish a publications fund that will allow books and diaries and letters to be published in the
- future. One of the things that is very obvious when you look at Monroe County is that the lack of materials
- available.
- And we hope to help remedy that by giving a publication fund, a research fund, if you will, a good shot
- on the arm. So that's where the royalties from this book, assuming there are any, will ultimately wind
- up. And I might add there's a lot of high-priced talent here. And the talent is, for the most part,
- volunteer. And so I think
- I'm not asking for mercy, but I just want you to know that this is not a group of people who are here
- at $5,000 an hour, which is, I think, what Jim Wright's attorney is getting as he peers. Do we need
- any help? I address this to the audience. Yes, we do need help. If anyone out there is interested in
- helping us or would like to volunteer time or whatever,
- We would be happy to have you get a hold of me or get a hold of anyone in the Historical Society. Call
- PAMP Service at the Monroe County Museum. And if you have any letters, diaries, or anything like that
- that might be useful, books, newspapers, pictures, please let us know about those. Let us borrow them.
- At least read them. Let us copy them.
- if possible. Now I can make a particular appeal for pictures. We have a fairly good museum collection.
- We've been open 10 years and people have been bringing in pictures over that time, but there are big
- gaps. And I know there are pictures out there in the community that people have that could really help
- illustrate aspects of the art history which we'd like to illustrate. So I suggest bring them into the
- museum. We'll have them copy. You get back the original and then you get the picture in the book. Before
- we open it up for questions from the floor,
- Those of you who are watching will probably have noticed by now that one member of our panel has been
- conspicuously silent. And you're going to say, boy, have they done a number on poor Donna Ray. That
- is not true. Donna is probably somewhat intimidated by this group. But let me very quickly say that
- Rose McElveen is going to be working heavily on the limestone industry. Ken Owen is going to handle
- the cultural history of the county.
- And Pam is working on the prehistory, incidentally, the Indians, and we haven't given her much chance
- to talk about the Indians, but Jim Madison is going to be working primarily on the 20th century. I'm
- going to be working mainly on the 19th century, and Donna is going to do something that is very interesting
- in that she's going to talk about the development of one of the major, I guess you'd say industries,
- and certainly an important facet of Monroe County today, and that's the
- the medical community in the hospital. So Donna, you have about, you have a couple of minutes if you'd
- like. Two minutes, huh? Two minutes. I am going to write about the medical history of Monroe County.
- And to answer one of these questions, how do you write a history and what is your source? Some of the
- sources that I've been using are public health records,
- I've been to the Indiana State Library to search through some of their volumes. I've been to the Indiana
- Historical Society. They've just recently published a book about a surgeon who is during this same period
- of time that I'll be writing about that will help lend some ideas of what may have happened or what
- happened during that time.
- I spent several days with Bea Snoddy, who was a local secretary at the hospital for I think more than
- 30 years to learn firsthand knowledge of working with the nursing school and physicians and just general
- running of the hospital. I've done some oral histories with retired physicians who practice in Monroe County.
- before antibiotics and after antibiotics and what a change that was. I've talked to professors at the
- IU School of Medicine and that was a major part of the training of physicians. In the beginning they
- were just, they learned by being with another physician and I'll be touching on the aspects of the training
- and licensing of physicians.
- And another aspect I'll be looking at is the effect of wars on medicine. So it would be kind of encompassing
- with the university and general life and how life changes, how medicine, how physicians treated something
- as simple as the sore throes or as difficult as a heart attack in the 1800s and how that's treated today.
- So basically that's it.
- Well, I've got the floor. I'm not going to do that. No, go ahead. It's yours. The library closes in
- 25 minutes. One thing I think about when Kent was speaking was about the mystique Bloomington has and
- how we're perceived by other communities. And I think we're perceived by who's looking at us. If it's
- industry, and these will be people who will be purchasing the books, if it's industry that's coming here,
- potential new employees, management people, they can look at the book and see what Bloomington is and
- who are the people, where they're coming from and where they're going. I think it could be a general
- interest book. I think the schools should be able to use it very well. I think new people just looking
- at Bloomington, new professors coming in,
- business people can use this book. And I think it should be used maybe by the welcome community, whatever
- their group is called, to welcome new people to Bloomington. So I think there'll be a great deal of
- use. It'll be used for gifts, as Pam said. Because if you've ever sent a young person away to school,
- you want to know something about the town that
- your child, your young person is attending. So I think it's a very helpful book. I think that is a real
- audience, and I agree with you strongly, Donna. But I'm not going to give up the hope that among the
- people who are going to learn something from this book are people like, let's say, Janet Dunn and Mr.
- Leffler and some of the others who know a great deal about the history of Monroe County. But I hope,
- and they'll have to tell us three or four years down the road, but I hope
- that they might learn something too from this book. Let me ask a question of Donna along the lines of
- what Jim Madison has proposed. This will undo some of my ignorance, not all of it, but some of it. I
- was denied a Monroe County birthright back in 1938 while my parents were living in Spencer because according
- to every tale that is still around in the family,
- The Bloomington Hospital had the highest infant mortality rate in southern Indiana, at least in south
- central Indiana. Do you recall why my mother had to be taken to Indianapolis to Coleman Hospital so
- I could be delivered there because the local hospital was so dreadful? Would that have been true at the time?
- I don't think I could. There are many answers to a question like that, but I will withhold. I would
- like to say that I certainly survived
- arriving in the Bloomington hospital. Oh, my dear, if I had only known. Let me add very quickly, Janet
- Dunn has a question. Let me add the composition of this panel is there are two Bloomington natives,
- or at least Monroe County natives. I believe, Donna, you're not. No, I'm not. I'm sorry. But Jim is.
- Jim is not here. No.
- You've been here a long time. You've been here over 20 years. There's one, Rose. There's one fan from
- California. There's Kent from Indiana, and I'm from Iowa, and Jim is from Pennsylvania. But we're all
- long-time residents in Monroe County. Now with that, Janet, go right ahead. What I want is for y'all
- to hurry up and get it out.
- for three years. Oh, sure. I am so excited about what you're doing. I think it's something that means
- real and true to me. And in spite of what you're all saying, we are unique. May I quote you, Janet?
- I'm collecting evidence. Thanks. Yeah, Bob, go right ahead.
- anything about social services in Monroe County? Yes, yes I could. Cecil Baldwin gave me a lot of materials
- so I went to the museum and I have her theses. She received her master's in 1920 from IU and they had
- 1924-25 and she received a PhD. And I have her theses which tell all about
- May I say that we hope to have forums like this
- I mean, more than just this one before the book comes out to keep that appetite wedded, but also maybe
- to start a tradition again of getting together and talking about Monroe County history. This is our
- second time this week that we've done it, and it's been very useful, not just for us, but for people
- in general. So maybe something like that will happen as well. Someone here wanted to make a comment.
- Didn't it, Rose? I would like to put in a bid on the health front for the
- Marvelous story about the wells downtown in front of the stores and the courthouse lawn and the inability
- of county residents or city people to see any relationship between the sudden rash of ailments and the
- arrival of a man from the State Department of Health who dropped a concentrated blue dye in the outhouse
- and drew blue water out of the wells around the square within fairly short order, within a couple of hours.
- I think that kind of story will be used, and I also have a cartoon that will go along with that, of
- like a typhoid, sitting at the town pump. And this was, I think, out of the Indianapolis Star. Those
- are fun stories, and I think that they'll make the reading readable. Sir, yeah? This is not a profound
- analysis of the problem, but just for your
- in this area, and it is a fact, I think, that the first dean of the graduate school, Eichmann, was the
- first surgery patient at Louisville Hospital, and he survived. At the beginning of the hospital, he
- died for a while. Why was that? Were several blind fish removed from his gullet at that time? I don't know.
- Well, I think it's likely, and you have gotten it, I'm sure of it, we have a hospital, because the ladies
- of the city of Louisville decided we had to have one, and the hospital is still owned by the local council
- of women. Why, let me ask you a question, since in almost any other place there is a county hospital,
- why no county hospital in this county does it?
- There never was one? But there never was any... We can have county people on the... And we, I think,
- are given... I'm not sure if we get any money at all. They do take care of some of the debt.
- Does it get 50,000 pounds a year? They may. They used to. Yeah, you were on campus. I've just been on
- the foundation. The hospitals just started becoming... I'm sorry.
- I think we still are unique because it is the only one in the country that's known by name.
- It's a magnificent institution. May I add a Jack Legg opinion to that, which I hope will be worked into
- somebody's presentation. It seems to me that much of what makes us a singular community has been the
- presence of
- women's leadership at levels of great significance in this community in comparison with other communities
- of comparable size and social and economic composition that we have and I hope this doesn't
- sound patronizing. I think we have been blessed by unusually bright and able women who have been in
- positions to express their talents
- for the good of the entire community. And my guess is that this is not evident in comparable communities.
- Now, that, as I say, is a jack-leg opinion that is put forward as a thesis, which will have
- to be investigated. That I think that this is one of the reasons for what makes it single. I think you'll
- find that Antelope Hill Cemetery was taken over by the group of women here in New England, and there were once
- and pass it over to the city. That's another thing. That's just what I thought, from the cradle to the
- grave, from the hospital to Rome too. By the way, I'm sorry. No, there's a comment. I'll come back to
- you, Bob. Go ahead. You'll have to speak up a little. Well, I'm speaking from the point of view of a
- librarian. This project is really needed. I mean, I know people
- I have been observing Amal Altomah work when people come in here asking for a really good
- history of Monroe County, and I have noticed that most often she gives them a copy of James Joyce's
- Ulysses or one of the Henry Miller books, either Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn, and you have
- helped to create some remarkable impressions of the community. Not Raindrie County, though. No, no.
- I give them Raindrie County. You do give them Raindrie County, but you don't urge that they see the
- movie, I think. Bob, go ahead. This has to do with the water problem.
- And what followed up was a blue dye on the north side of the courthouse, the outhouse there, going down
- to the well of College Fire for a blank one. But this has to do with, just after the Indianapolis and
- Southern Railway was built, all the blasting that occurred in the cutting of all the stone and so forth
- in order to clear the tracks.
- they had to pass the law, forbidding anyone to use their wells because they became contaminated with
- water that flowed through. And they were allowed to use systems. So this was about 1904 or five when
- I'm there. And that is a facet of the water problem the voters had here. I know that oddly enough, one
- of the reasons Bloomington was founded, where it is,
- aside from the fact that the university had, or the seminary rather, had nice springs down there, which
- was quite flowing. This north of Abner Blair's long cabin, which is on the northeast corner of what
- is known Madison and Fifth, there was quite a flowing spring there. That impressed the commissioners
- appointed by the state. Now the first commissioners were really from other counties.
- Now, there's also one on the southeast corner of 6th and what is now Madison. Then there was one up
- the main stream, which has quite a history about it. There are anecdotes about it. It was between 7th
- and 8th Street, what was then Spring Street now, of course. And there were so many streams, you know,
- there are many branches growing on it. You have Springer's branch, you know.
- Yeah, if I may put in a plug then for chapter one, which is my chapter. Actually, I'm very lucky to
- have that chapter because
- It starts about 600 million years ago and ends in 1816. So why I'm lucky is because there's no one around
- who can tell me it wasn't that way. But I'm doing the best to try to get a close approximation of what
- actually happened during that considerable period of time. But actually, it isn't just an academic matter
- of vague interest.
- It directly relates to very real things like this question of the water shortage. You know, this was
- a recurrent theme throughout our history. And it's because of the geologic past, where we have the springs
- and where we have the karsticography, the sinkholes and all this sort of thing.
- comes directly out of our geologic past. And it has had a very profound impact on us, the agricultural
- history of the community. True, we do have agriculture that is a part of our history. But this is not,
- and never really has been, a major agricultural community for very specific geologic reasons. The glaciers
- didn't come here. We have these lovely scenic hills. But we have very shallow, nasty soil on hills and
- hollows. And you see that theme all the way through the Indian history.
- of the thousands and thousands of years that Indians lived here, this was a very marginal area. And
- they only really lived here with any intensity when the population size was such that they were forced
- out of the more desirable areas into Monroe County. Let me put you on the spot, Councilman, Councilwoman.
- Are you suggesting that maybe we're limited in our development possibilities? Are we going to reach
- a point where we don't go any further? I think that's a very significant consideration. We just recently had
- an out-of-town developer drops sort of a development bombshell on us and says, here, we're going to
- come in and do this for you. But Bloomington isn't like a lot of other communities because we do have
- some real physical constraints on the kind of development that can go on here. We've seen this with
- what are we going to do with all our solid waste? We've got a landfill that's filling up. It's in the
- only part of the county, really, where you can have a landfill.
- The state says you've got to have another one, you've got to do something, you're running out of space.
- Where are we going to put it? There is no place geologically that is safe to put it. If you put it in
- an incinerator, then you've got a whole lot of other problems to develop. This sort of thing, you like
- to think that you don't really have to read those early chapters in the history book because it doesn't
- affect you, but it does, right? Sure. Well, we're about out of time. We are out of time. So there are
- a lot of topics that we haven't covered. We haven't talked about religion, which is
- big part of Monroe County's history. We haven't talked about the good old American staple, the speculation
- bomb, which someone told me the other day there are 450 realtors in Monroe County right now. There are
- a lot of topics. We'll come back the next time, but I want to thank the members of the audience.
- And again, it's a bad night. It's a dark and stormy night, a Snoopy would say. And we have a crowd,
- I estimate, closely at around 180,000 people here, give or take 179,800. But I want to thank the people
- in the audience, ladies and gentlemen, the members of the panel. This has been a lot of fun. And have
- a safe moment. We'll see you again soon. Thank you. Massive applause.
- Thank you.