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.