Okay, we're about ready. So welcome to another program of the Monroe County History Club. It's a beautiful
day, and it's great that you guys, you could be anywhere you want, and you chose to be here with us.
So thanks for showing up, everybody. Welcome to my wife, Paulette, and my cousins who attend here regularly.
A list of sheets of paper on the tables, it's the usual stuff, the upcoming programs for the next year.
And there's quite a few of them,
Really interesting ones. Many thanks to the American Legion for allowing us to have these programs.
We've been doing it now for 13 years, over 13 years. Yeah. And thanks so much to the wait staff and
kitchen staff. Today, Amanda is here, and she's accompanied by her mother, Kelly. So thanks for putting
in her time to help us.
Please be generous with the servers. And of course, I'd like to thank CATS TV, as always, for recording
these programs. And it's been almost 11 years. So we've got like 120 recorded programs on our YouTube
channel going way back. Dave is our camera guy today, as he is most times. He does a wonderful job.
It's an important service to us.
As it allows us to upload each program to YouTube, we can't make it to the live programs. It allows
us to preserve our local history for future generations. Also, thanks to those who watch the programs
on YouTube. Much appreciated. I hear from transplanted Bloomingtonians all over the country who watch
these and are thankful that they get to see them. Do we have any new attendees today?
If you want to leave your email address with me, it's fine. They would put you on your, on our direct
mailing list if you like. It's also on Facebook, but not everybody is on Facebook. And speaking to the
emails, Steve Brewer helps me with that a lot. Thanks to Steve for everything he does.
If you I'm Steve if you've seen the mailings you might check your junk mail or if you have friends who
wonder why they're not being notified We try to stay really on top of this Michael and I are in communication
But a couple different people including our guest speaker today Has not been getting the emails even
though he's in the system So you may want to check with friends and make sure they're not being posted
in your junk mail. Okay? Good idea Steve
I'll read something here about one of our sister organizations. This is for Bloomington newcomers and
neighbors. It invites people to watch a program called Courage of the Face of Hate, Hoosiers Who Stood
Against the Klan, presented by Dr. James Madison, Professor Emeritus of History of Indiana University.
That'll be Tuesday, October the 13th, right here at the American Legion, 1130 for lunch and 1230 for
the presentation. And it's free, it's much like ours.
So you're welcome to come to that if you like. And this leads to today. Today's speaker is David Nord.
And Dave has given at least five presentations, right? Maybe six? At least five, I'm pretty sure about
that. So he's no stranger to here. He's a great speaker. And he happens to be the official historian
of Monroe County.
So we are pleased and honored to have him attend and do another one of our programs. The program is
called The Lay of the Land, Geography and the Development of Manufacturing in Monroe County,
1820 to 1890. And we're sure to learn something here because I don't know anything about that. So David.
Thanks, Mike. My computer went to sleep while Mike was talking. I don't know if that.
but I'll wake it up here. Okay, all right, we'll wake it up. So what I want to talk about with you today
is this question, why are we here? And this, I don't mean this as a religious or philosophical question.
It's just a place question, it's about place.
OK, I don't want to get too much. Is that OK now? OK. Why are we here? Why are we in this particular
place? So it's a question about geography. And I want you to think about geography as two separate kinds
of things. Physical geography and political or human geography. Physical geography is the lay of the land.
and human geography is how people interact with that. And they do it by adjusting themselves to the
land, or they adjust the lands to themselves. And that difference is an important thing in the development
of manufacturing in this county. So kind of keep these two things in mind. Geography has an impact on
human life, but it's not destiny, but it is history.
And that's an old saying, geography is destiny, and I'm adding the part. No, but it is history. So let's
talk about geography in Monroe County. The first part here is about why we are here. And I mean, I think
I'm making this, gotta get the mic right here. Why are we here? And by here, I mean, why are we here
at the corner of
Walnut and First Street looking to the northwest because that's an important question and it has to
do with manufacturing later on in this county. Here's what that scene looked like in 1840 from that
particular perspective. It's the campus of Indiana University and in an important way that is why we're
here. It has to do with central place,
The placement of IU here explains why Bloomington is here and that has to do with the way in
which manufacturing developed in the 19th century. So why is IU where it is? I'm not going to spend
much time on this at all. Some of you know the answer to that and some of you don't. I want to give
you a quick view of that and this could take a whole
lecture if you ever get a chance to hear one. IU was cited in two stages first in 1816 and then in 1820.
The first stage in 1816 was choosing a township that would support higher education in the new state
of Indiana and then in 1820 the Indiana legislature chose to use that township as the site for the Indiana
College. The reason why it
this particular site was chosen, Seminary Township, or as we call it now Perry Township, is because
it was a central place. Now, in what sense was it a central place? Well, Indiana in 1816 was settled
and surveyed only south of Bloomington. What you see on this map, which shows Indian treaties, that
the Treaty of St. Mary's, which brought into the
to use by settlers and by surveyors came in 1818. IU was cited before that and it was really the farthest
north and the most central place that could be found in the central, I mean in the surveyed part of
Indiana. The committee of the state constitutional convention that was appointed to figure out
what would be this township and to offer it to the federal government was composed of three members,
one of whom was from Vincennes, one of whom was from Brookville, Vincennes along the Wabash River, Brookville
on the Whitewater and on the
eastern edge of Indiana. And the other one was from Paoli. So they represented the west, the east, and
the south. And the most central place that they could agree on was that township right up there
by Bloomington showing on this map. So what was that township like? Well, this is the surveyor's map
from the surveying of that township in 1812.
and you can't see much on it, so I'll show you just six mile square sections of the northern part of
that township. And those squiggly lines are where surveyors crossed their survey lines and thought they
saw creeks and could figure which way those creeks were flowing. So these maps are full of these squiggly
lines. And in the case of this spot,
By the way, section four there is where the college would be founded right at the northern end of the
township. They couldn't see these very well, so they only marked them where they were crossing them
at the section lines. On this particular map, the one stream that gets a little bit more of specific
attention is the one right there along the edge
of Section 10. I live in Section 10 and know that stream well. It's Jackson Creek and that's where it
flows along the side of College Mall. So that one they could see kind of well but the others they couldn't.
Here's the
Here's the township north of that, which came to be called Bloomington Township. And this one also has
a lot of squiggly lines. These are the hand-drawn maps from 1812 around that time. And the southern
sections of that are the sections at Butt Seminary Township. And section 33 is where the first
Bloomington Town was formed. The squiggly lines don't tell us much except kind of up there in section
28 and 27. What are we seeing there? If we look a little farther north in Bloomington Township on this,
they could see the streams a little bit better and so they drew them in a little bit more. And what
you're seeing on this, the big stream there,
in Section 2221 is Griffey Creek. That's Griffey. And the one that goes straight south to north and
flows into Griffey Creek is Cascades. So that's what they knew about this area when the surveying was
done. In 1815, the Surveyor General's Office made a really good map of Indiana based on these surveys.
It shows streams all over the surveyed part of Indiana. This is the first really good map of Indiana
after the surveying was done. And that, where I put the red marks, are the townships that would become
Monroe County. And it's right up there in the center of the settled part of the state and right in the
center east to west as well. So there we are.
Those are the sections, those are the townships in what would become Monroe County. If we look at that
really closely, you can begin to see that as they tied these stream fragments together, they did a pretty
good job. The northern part of Monroe County, you can see is Bean Blossom Creek, and the southern tier
of six townships, you can see on the east side,
Salt Creek, and right there north to south is Clear Creek. And the first, a really nice early commercial
map that was made of this area, and they made these maps very quickly, the map makers of New York and
Philadelphia, as soon as they got their hands on real surveys, and made really good maps. And here is
an atlas that shows
Indiana and Ohio and here's what Monroe County looks like in that 1825 map. And it's pretty good. Bloomington
is sited right there in the middle as a central place. It was made the county seat because it was in
the middle of the county that was organized in 1818. And the only other thing on here besides the surveyed
townships are the creeks.
And they're by name already in 1825. Bean Blossom in the north, Clear Creek in the south, and Salt Creek,
I should say, with its main tributary, Clear Creek. So that's why we're here, and that's what the surveys
began to show what it was like to be here in the very early days of settlement.
So let's talk about what this land was like in part two here. This is the very interesting cover,
I think, particularly like for my talk, because it's Visit Bloomington's current visitor's guide cover
for this year. And instead of a more up-to-date picture of Bloomington of the county, they've got a
picture of sort of primordial Monroe County, but it still looks the same if you look in the right direction.
If you're in the air above Bloomington and you look to the southeast, you see pretty much what this
place was like 200 years ago with the only difference is that there's something peeking in the background
there and that's a lake and we'll come back to what that means for manufacturing in this county. So
what was this land like?
Most of you have probably seen maps like this one, a geological map of Indiana that shows the geological
or physiographic regions of the state. And if we look at southern Indiana, what you notice on any geological,
physiographical map of Indiana is the absolute importance of the Wisconsin Glacier that reached just
north of Monroe County in its extent
continental glacier in the last ice age and then began to retreat. Everything north of that line,
that line, everything shown here in blue is utterly different than everything south of that blue area.
The blue area is covered with many deep deposits of glacial till and our area has none of that. Our
area is a geological area that's eroded over
a couple of hundred thousand years to produce the surface geography that we have. Well, what do we have
here? We've got three areas that are named by geologists, the Norman Upland, the Mitchell Plateau, and
the Crawford Upland. And in Monroe County, you see this as sort of three stripes, north and south through
the county.
These are geological underground features of the bedrock, but it has an impact on the surface as well,
and therefore on the settlement and the agriculture and manufacturing of the county. So, for example,
agriculture. This is a land use map, an agriculture map, a soil map, if you will, from the middle of
the 20th century.
And the black parts are deemed by the county planners to be unsuited for any kind of agriculture, unsuited
for agriculture. Some of the land in the middle there is suited for general agriculture, but a lot of
it is suited only for what they call light agriculture, which mainly means hills that can't be plowed,
but are good for hay,
grazing, and so forth. And the black, we get a little bit of the black in the southwest of the county,
too, of parts that are just simply unsuited for agriculture. If we look at this more closely, this is
the top six townships, you can see how these black areas and the dotted areas and the lined areas show
different kinds of agriculture in different parts of the county.
bean blossom bottoms there that you see with dots, that's the floodplain of bean blossom. And it's good
agriculture, but it floods. It's a floodplain. And the same thing is true in Salt Creek's basin in the
southwest. Essentially, the southwest part of the county is either unsuited for agriculture or the floodplain
of Salt Creek is fine for
growing things, it's just that they might be flooded and ruined at any time in any given year. So the
middle part of the county and up toward the northwest is where the best agriculture was, but it was
never very good. I'm telling you about agriculture because agricultural processing is what the first
manufacturing in the county was. So the bigger picture for Monroe County
has to do with the big river systems of the state. The county lies between the White River's west fork
and the White River's east fork. That's what the first map shows. The second map here shows all of the
major river systems of Indiana. And all of those blue blotches are reservoirs today on the rivers. If
we look at
The south part of Indiana, that star that I put in is where Monroe County is. Here's the southern part.
So we lie between the forks of the White River and between the tributary of the White River to the north
of us, Bean Blossom, and the tributary to the White River to the south of us, Salt Creek. The two smudges
of blue are the two reservoirs that appear, Lake Lemon and the north.
Lake Monroe in the south. So what impact did this have on the growth of manufacturing in the county
in the pioneer period? Well this picture, it's a current picture, it's the main waterway that Monroe
County has, it's the main highway by water that Monroe County has a connection with and that's the west
fork of the White River which nicks the
northwest corner of the county. And this is a picture that I took. That's the historic Sechrist Ferry
Bridge in the background that is between Monroe and Owen County today. So in talking about manufacturing,
we need to talk about three things. We need to talk about land, transportation, and power. By land,
economists mean that by that,
anything that's used as raw materials for manufacturing. Natural resources of some sort are processed
into something else. So that's you need for manufacturing. You need some kind of transportation, particularly
if you're going to do a kind of a long distance sort of manufacturing enterprise. And you need power.
Human power exists, animal power exists, but what pioneers wanted was water power. Some of the first
settlers were looking for possible mill sites because the aim was to process agricultural products into
flour, into meal, and to process the forest products into lumber. So we're looking for water power sites.
In the county,
In Monroe County, everything was connected to water. To have agriculture, you need what they called
in those days a well-watered land. Rain, of course, but also access to water for livestock and for domestic
use, just to do a farm. And because this is an unglaciated area, the whole county is a poor place for wells.
And so most of the water that was used came from streams and creeks and springs and cisterns collecting
rainwater. Transport, for any distance, was waterborne transport. The great highway into the west at
that time in the early years was the Ohio River, and settlement came up from the Ohio. And the Wabash
and White Rivers
were used for transportation as well. And power was falling water or running water. And mill sites were
much coveted. So these two maps then, that's the early map from 1825. The second map I'm showing you
here from 150 years later looks kind of the same. It's a drainage map that that's why
If we look at it here, it has a whole bunch of numbers on it because it's an official drainage map of
Monroe County and it shows how the tributaries and the runoff in the county goes into the major creeks.
Creeks being Bean Blossom Creek and Salt Creek. And that star is where Bloomington and IU are in the
middle. So if you look at the top, the three townships, and this is a kind of a current map you can see,
how Bean Blossom Creek dominates the flow of water in the north, and Salt Creek dominates the flow of
water in the south six counties, with Clear Creek right in the middle being the main tributary. Now
there's a little bit of water flow to the west. There in Indian Creek township is Indian Creek.
which flows off to the west in a different way, still ends up going south. But the Bean Blossom Salt
Creek, that's the key to settlement and manufacturing. So here's a map from 1840 of Indiana. And if
we focus in on Monroe, you can see what the towns were like that grew up.
And two of those towns, and maybe a couple others too, but the two that I'm gonna talk about
are manufacturing centers, Mount Tabor and Fairfax. Mount Tabor on Bean Blossom Creek, Fairfax on Salt
Creek. So looking at a map from 1850s, a county map, if we focus in,
on Bean Blossom Township where Mount Tabor is. I'll give you an idea of what kind of place Mount Tabor
was in the 1820s and 30s. So here's, we focus in a little tighter here. This shows where Mount Tabor
lay on Bean Blossom Creek a couple of miles from where it drains into the White River.
And the big spots on this map are damage to the map. That big circle spot, I imagine, an early map reader
spilling his coffee on that or something. But that's what that is. So you can ignore that. But Mount
Tabor was sighted at what's the best spot upstream from the White River on Bean Blossom Creek. It can
be close to the creek, but not so close that it floods every spring.
The trouble with these creeks in Monroe County is that they tend either to have bluffs on one side that
are too high for a town, and then floodplain on the other side that's too low for a town. So a spot
what you want for any kind of settlement is something near the creek. Why do you want to be near the
creek? Well, because that's where you were going to do manufacturing. This is the hand-drawn plat map for
Mount Tabor from 1828 that is in the collection of the History Center. And it has, I should say it has
66 lots laid out, very optimistic about the future of Mount Tabor, too optimistic. But right down there
at the bottom of the map, it is the industrial center of Mount Tabor in the 1820s. Two mills on Bean
Blossom Creek, a grist mill
and a sawmill, and then a bridge over the creek. So for power, they had water. And Mount Tabor also
was near enough to the White River that in flood times, they could actually use flatboats to
take manufactured or produce down Bean Blossom Creek to the White River. So what was Mount Tabor like
in the early days? It was platted in 1828.
Five years later, a gazetteer of Indiana came out, which gave reports on towns around the state, and
here's what they had to say about Mount Tabor. Mount Tabor, a village on Bean Blossom Creek,
in Monroe County is situated in the northwest corner of the county about 13 miles northwest from Bloomington
in the vicinity of a high hill from which it takes its name. At this place there is a valuable mill
erected and from this point at times of high water flat boats down Bean Blossom Creek to the White River
laden with the produce of the county. Mount Tabor is the place of deposit for the produce of the northern
part of the county
And the mill establishment is destined to be of great importance in a few years. So that's Mount Tabor
as the manufacturing center of the county based upon for the three holy trinity of manufacturing, land,
transportation, and power. Water, water, water. And there's a flatboat engraving. And they're from all
over the...
anybody who could get close to a river sent flat boats down the river in the spring floods. Now Mount
Tabor had actually something else going for it or at least it hoped it did. Come back to this map and
this map shows in a little kind of dotted line there up by White River something that Mount Tabor people
were really excited about and that is the Central Canal.
In the canal age, which Jake Butler told you about a few weeks ago, one of the canals that was planned
was a central canal. The one that was built, the Wabash and Erie Canal, connects Lake Erie to the Ohio
River, and that was pretty much built. The central canal, which goes through Indianapolis, goes from
Peru to Worthington, wasn't built, but they thought it was going to be built, and that would have
Here's more of a close-up of that. Nicking the corner of Monroe County would have made Mount Tabor in
direct water connection to Indianapolis as well as south to the Ohio and north to Lake Erie. I mean,
these people were bubbling with enthusiasm for their town in 1833, 1840.
That canal was never built. Part of it was built in Indianapolis, which you're probably familiar with
now as a tourist attraction. So that's the story of Mount Tabor, and that's a kind of story that's repeated,
but it has the best spot for manufacturing in the county on Bean Blossom Creek. At the other side of
the county, down in the lower townships, the Salt Creek was the
Creek of importance. So here's Clear Creek Township with some of the sections that include Harrodsburg
and Fairfax in the 1850s. So if we focus in on Fairfax, we'll tell that story too. It's a little like
Mount Tabor's. These are the entrepreneurs of Fairfax, the Heltons, Andrew Helton and Michael Helton.
They owned a lot of the property, they owned stores, and they had a mill there, a grist mill, and they
did meat packing, salt pork. And just like Mount Tabor, Fairfax during flood times was able to send
produce products down the Salt Creek. They had farther to go to get to the White River, because they
were going south to Bedford, where the Salt Creek joins,
the East Fork of the White River. But Fairfax sits on the creek a lot like Mount Tabor. It's not on
a bluff, so it's close to the water. It's close to where the mill was built on the creek. But it's not
going to be flooded very often because it's high, but not too high above the creek. Here's a topographical
map from the 20th century that shows what
the Salt Creek flood plain looked like and where Fairfax was, right there on a kind of higher ground
peninsula almost into the Salt Creek flood plain. How high did the water go when Salt Creek flooded?
Well, luckily we have, we can check it out if you fill it completely up.
which is what we did with Lake Monroe, you get the idea of just how flooded you could make the valley
of Salt Creek. And this map shows how even so, Fairfax stays above water. That little peninsula right
in the middle there is where the village of Fairfax stood. And this is a current map of Lake Monroe.
And the squiggly line under the water there is the original
route of Salt Creek before it was flooded for the lake. So that's Fairfax, similar, and did use water,
water, water, just like Mount Tabor did to develop early pioneer manufacturing. Another place like that
is Harrodsburg, a little bit different. Harrodsburg isn't as close to its creek, which is Clear Creek,
but it is close to
a mill that was on Clear Creek at that time called Chambers Mill. Chambers Mill is about a quarter of
a mile or half a mile north of Harrodsburg. If you look at this a little bit closer, you see Harrodsburg
relationship to Chambers Mill. The mill is on the main north-south road between Bloomington and Harrodsburg,
in a way evolved into Highway 37, but this is now Gore Road. Gore Road in that area follows what was
the original road in the 1850s. And if you drive on Gore Road and stop at where it crosses Clear Creek
and look and squint and think, you can see some
foundation stones, which if you're me, you imagine, are the foundation stones of Chambers Mill. There
are the foundation stones of some mill on Clear Creek at this site on Gore Road there along the side.
So those are the two examples of what was going on in the countryside in pioneer milling.
Another kind of mill that's really important for early manufacturing is the hillside or cave spring
mill. And in Van Buren Township, we have a good example of that. Here's this map. It's kind of hard
to see, but it follows a tributary to Clear Creek. Not a very big stream, but it has four mills on it.
And two of those mills are right near the source.
of this little creek. Those mills are Shirley's Mill and Leonard's Mill. And their caves bring mill
sites where the water is flowing from a cave, can easily be routed over an overshot water wheel of fairly
good size, which you couldn't do on the creeks like Bean Blossom or Salt Creek. And they made good mill sites.
Here's a topographical map that shows the origin of that stream that comes from this valley, this box
canyon that we now call Leonard Springs Nature Park. And there were mills at each one of the cave springs
that fed this creek. Surely spring looks like this today. Most of you have probably walked down there
from time to time.
really low water. But in those days, cave springs were the best kind of thing for mills in some ways,
because they were so steady. For millers on water millers, the worst two things were too much water,
too little water. Either there wasn't enough water to turn the wheel, or the whole thing was washed
away in spring floods. Water wheel buildings, everything ruined.
There's very few surviving mills because they've all been washed away at some point. A cave spring is
more steady, but Monroe County didn't have many of these kinds of sites. This is about the best one
in Monroe County. Leonard's is a little better than Shirley's Spring here, but they don't run as steady
as they once did either. This is what a good cave spring looks like, but this is in Lawrence County.
And it did lead to a really nice mill being built. Here it is, Spring Mill, Hamers Mill. And when you
look at that water flowing, the Monroe County people would say, man, if I had that kind of water from
my cave, I'd be all set. But instead, in Monroe County, the Hillside Springs produced little mills like
this one. This is the Carter Mill, the Carter Family Mill that Mike
R. Mike Carter is descended from. And this mill survived long enough to be photographed in the 1890s
or early 20th century because it's not on a stream that would wash it away in the spring floods. It's
on a tiny little spring-fed creek, small creek that flows over this very, very small wheel. And here's another
picture of that. That's Mike himself in 1900. He helped out at the family mill in 1900. And he's standing
there. He's got his hands on his hips. He's saying, oh my god, I hate this job. I'm going to go to pharmacy
school. And eventually, that mill disappeared.
It's one of the few that had survived into the 20th century, but it was kind of a nothing mill compared
to one like Hamer's Mill in Lawrence County. There were other rural businesses in Monroe County, rural
manufacturing, but not many. Almost all of it was saw mills, grist mills. One that you may have heard
of is the Virginia Iron Works. A little bit of iron ore was found in a site in Indian Creek Township,
and it was
A furnace was set up with charcoal. It was expensive to cut charcoal. They couldn't get workers. There
was no transportation. It lasted a couple of years. Essentially, manufacturing in the county meant saw
milling and grist milling. One exception to that is this one. This is a mill on the Ketchum's Mill on
was on Clear Creek near where the Ketchum House is still there. The mill's gone. But this mill survived
into the 20th century and burned in 1909. But it kind of is a cheat as an example of a county rural
mill. Because if you look closely on the back, they're off to the side. This is not a water mill. This
is a steam-powered mill. And steam has another story.
And STEAM takes us into another place in Monroe County. And that place is Bloomington. So that's the
next part of the story here. Bloomington, what was going on in Bloomington. This is a scene that I'm
not going to tell you where this is. Some of you may know where this is. But I'll come back to this
later. That's my granddaughter Phoebe there playing in a Bloomington spring, a hillside spring.
is a wonderful example of a Bloomington water source. This is what Bloomington had for water, this hillside
springs. And she's playing there in this spring, and I'll come back to this particular spring later.
Bloomington lay right between these two watersheds, as you've seen in these earlier maps. Here's what
that looks like on the ground.
today in Bloomington. This is a map of the city of Bloomington that shows the watersheds of Bloomington's
streams going south and north. And the big black line is the divide between the White River's forks.
The top goes north, drains to the west fork of the White River. The south drains to the east fork of
the White River. And the divide is right through the heart of Bloomington, about on 11th Street.
about on 11th Street in downtown. So if you start, if you drive up the hill on Walnut from the Courthouse
Square from 1st Street, you go uphill, uphill, uphill, you come to the 11th Street and then you go downhill.
You're crossing there then at 11th Street to divide between the White Rivers, East Fork and West Fork.
And if you forget that when you're driving there, just look up at the name of that building.
there on the left, the crest. And that will remind you that you're at the summit. This is the summit
between the watersheds. Or if you're on the bypass, when you drive up from College Mall on the bypass
north, you go up, up, up, up, up to 10th Street and pass. And then the road even has to make a rock
cut through the hill by the hospital. And then it goes down, down, down. This is the summit.
In fact, this is the highest point in the city limits of elevation in the city of Bloomington. And the
water tank there gives you a clue that you're at a high point. In fact, as you drive around the country,
if you see a water tank sitting on the ground, you're at the summit of the water works that that water
tank. Otherwise, it'd be up on a tower, but here it can be on the ground. It's a high point. So this
is a map of drainage.
a current map of drainage, and it shows the relationship of current drainage to the streams. Those,
if we look at the top part of the city, the northern part of the city, all these dots, what they show
is entry points for storm drains. The red dots are underground, the blue dots are entries into streams
above ground.
And what the streams are is the remnants of the original streams that were there. And that's the names
of the watersheds, too. The Griffey watershed is there on the east. Right in the middle is Clear Creek.
In the north part here, it's Cascades. Cascades, whose main source in our day is the parking lot of
the football stadium. And it goes north.
And then outside the city limits is Stout Creek going north. South, we've got Jackson Creek on the east,
Clear Creek in the middle. And then the west fork of Clear Creek, which is in the far west, begins at
Twin Lakes, runs down Weimar Road to the town of the village of Clear Creek. Jackson Creek joins Clear
Creek about at
Maze Greenhouse or so is where that comes together. Now for the city of the 19th century, it's all about
those streams that come into Clear Creek. That's the source of, and so here's a map of the city in 1910
that's a topographical map and it has the creeks on it. They're all out of the ground in 1910. Nobody's
underground like they are
And I drew in these creeks with some red here so you can see them. This is Spanker's Brant, later Jordan,
the Jordan River and now called the Campus River that flows from the east through the IU campus. Then
in our time, it ducks underground and stays underground until it gets to First Street. This is the route
of the central branch of Clear Creek in primordial days that rose
from springs up in the Crestmont area and flows right through the heart of town, now along the Beeline
Trail, but was along the railroad track in railroad days. And then this is the, not what they now call
the West Fork, which is farther west, but the fork that is near west that has its origin in several
springs by
Kleindorfers Hardware and a little bit north of that, the main one being Illinois Central Spring and
flows along Patterson Drive and joins Clear Creek near in Switchyard Park. Patterson Drive was a railroad
right away and now it's a road and Illinois Central Spring is polluted by PCBs so there's a
water treatment plant there, very close to where we are today, just a little bit, a quarter of a mile
that way. So here's the origin of the Campus River, just south of the Water Tower, north of Tulip Tree
Apartments. That's it, that's where Campus River begins. The source of Clear Creek, the central part
of Clear Creek is
In this area where the two railroads cross, now one of them is a railroad. The one above is the Indiana
Railroad and then the Beeline Trail. This is a scene from Ernest Butler Park that shows Clear Creek
out of the ground. There's not much going on there. Water often isn't flowing there. Things have changed
so much. This branch of Clear Creek goes underground at Fairview
and stays underground through the whole rest of the downtown and comes out of the ground at 1st Street,
just south of Seminary Square. And here's Lemon Lane Landfill, which pollutes the Illinois Central Spring
and needs to be treated before it sends its water down Patterson Drive. This is where it comes out.
after being underground for a while just across Adams Street from Hinkle's Hamburgers and it stays out
of the ground until it meets up with Clear Creek at the pavilion at Switchard Park. So that's what these
were like in the original settlement of Bloomington and they were the water source for industrialization. The two
Campus River and the middle branch of Clear Creek joined before they come out of the ground at 1st Street.
And here's where they are coming out of the ground at 1st Street. So this is right by where the original
campus of IU was. And that's it. That's Clear Creek when you can see it with the Jordan River, Campus
River and Clear Creek bringing it together. So what did Bloomington do
realm of land transportation and power. Well, that's not much water, no transportation, no power. So
what was Bloomington? It was a central place and if we read what the 1833 guidebook says about it,
you get the idea of what sort of place it was. It's a place with a population of about 600 souls, amongst
whom are four clergymen, three physicians, two lawyers, five teachers, eight merchants, about 30 artisan
mechanics of different descriptions. The situation is healthy. It's surrounded by fertile, rich land.
And it abounds with never failing springs of pure water.
but it derives its importance principally from its propinquity to the Indiana College. So it's a central
place in the sense that it needs lawyers, it's a county seat, it has teachers, and it does have artisans
and mechanics, as it says. And what that meant then was that handwork, this was essentially handwork,
boots and shoes, leather work, some textile work, blacksmithing,
essentially no milling of the sort that was water powered, but hand work. The only exception to hand
work was horsepower. And a number of the sites had horse treadmills like this, this is an engraving,
to run things like the bellows at a blacksmith shop, things like that. But manufacturing in Bloomington
in the early days was very, very slim and very oriented
because it had no water-oriented handwork. The most famous one of these mechanics, artisans, was Austin
Seward, who was a blacksmith who came in 1821. Seward is most famous for launching a family business
that lasted for 160 years. The Seward shop closed in the 1980s.
But he was an excellent blacksmith who was particularly good with making edge tools, axes, and so forth.
So the way manufacturing worked in a place that had no mechanical power was handwork, but handwork that
had a lot of value added. People would come from far to buy axes and sides from the sewer shop in the
early days.
That's what early manufacturing was like in Bloomington. Not much, but certain specialties. And it was
related, as they say, about sewer. People would come from miles around. Well, how did they get there?
Well, because Bloomington was a central place, it had some roads. It was beginning to have some roads.
This is a book about roads in the United States in 1814 with a map of Indiana. And Indiana had one road,
according to
this book in 1814. One road, it was the road called the Buffalo Trace from Jeffersonville to Vincennes.
But a few years later, when John Mellish, the cartographer here, made a map of Indiana, first in 1817,
this one is 1819, which has Monroe County on it, more roads appeared in the southern part of Indiana.
But Monroe, nothing, no roads rated being in this map. And north of Monroe County, as I've already said,
there was no surveyed places even, much less real roads. But this was a problem for Indiana, because
as you see with this map, the state itself was projected to go all the way to Lake Michigan.
The legislature in Indiana decided in 1821 to remove the capital of the state right to the middle of
the state. And they named it Indianapolis. And it didn't exist. And it was to be plopped down on the
White River as far north as they thought they could go at that time to be a central place for the state.
And on this map that this was made,
was made from somebody penciled in in Indianapolis. So it's to be a central place, but not yet. That's
a problem. It's kind of a bad thing to have a state capital with no roads. So that legislative session
in 1821 also authorized and authorized the subsidy of the building of a network of roads
in southern Indiana so that people could actually go to Indianapolis. And two of those roads involved
Bloomington. A road from Indianapolis to Bloomington and two roads from Bloomington to the Ohio River
were authorized in 1821. So Bloomington's chosen as the site for these roads because it's the county
seat, a central place, and would connect
Indianapolis to the Ohio River. One of those roads went to Fredonia in Ohio and the other was supposed
to go to Rockport. The Rockport Road never was finished, but some of it was built. You've probably driven
on it in Monroe County. It goes a few miles.
down to Popcorn or someplace like that and then sort of peters out. But it was originally supposed to
go to Rockport on the Ohio River and was authorized in 1821 to do that. So Bloomington had something
going for it. Not only did it have its own central place in the county, but it had a central role in
the state as well. We know these roads were used because this map of
Postal Roads in 1839 of Ohio and Indiana rates roads for being a four-horse male post coach road, a
two-horse road, and a one-horse road. So the roads are coded so you can see how decent they were. If
we look at Monroe County, Bloomington obviously
All roads lead to Bloomington according to the Postal Service of 1839. And one of those roads is a four-horse
postal coach road that goes north to south right through the heart of the county and does not go through
Mount Tabor or Fairfax. I will mention that because it becomes important as time goes by. Another measure
of the use of roads was stagecoach lines.
in this particular book from 1839, which is a Tourist and Immigrants Guide to the West, it has one stagecoach
line listed for Bloomington that mentions Bloomington. It's the Indianapolis to Fredonia line on the
Ohio River and here are the stops and these towns will look familiar to you.
The first one may not. Far west in Johnson County is gone. It's near where Waverly is. But then we've
got Martinsville, Bloomington, Springville, Bedford, Orleans, Paoli, Milltown, Leavenworth, and Freedonia.
Some of you, I think, are wondering, where the heck is Freedonia? Well, Freedonia had great plans in
the early years and was this county seat of Crawford County, but atrophy.
And if you go looking for Fredonia now, you can see their beautiful courthouse that was built in the
early 19th century. Fredonia's on Horseshoe Bend on the Ohio River. And here's what their courthouse
looks like now. So Fredonia disappeared. But meanwhile, in the 1870s, Bloomington had a courthouse that
looked like this. Bloomington was doing very well. Why's that?
Well, the answer to that is largely summed up in a single word. Railroad. The railroad. When the railroad
came to Bloomington, it came in 1854. North-South connected the Ohio River with Lake Michigan at Michigan
City. And this is a current scene of how the railroad cut through the center of town. This is the Beeline
Trail at 6th Street.
And here's that same scene from about the late 70s where you can see the remnant of the railroad as
it came through the city. And the old manufacturing part of the city followed this line. Here's the
engraving of the railroad of that era. And here's a map that shows the modern Monon line that goes from not just
from New Albany to Michigan City, but really did connect the Monon to Louisville and Indianapolis and
Chicago. But that's a 20th century story. This railroad was part of a huge growth of railroads, steam
railroad mileage. I'll focus in here on Indiana. In 1850, Indiana had about 200 miles of track
In 1860, it had 2,000 miles of track. Almost 2,000 miles of railroad were laid down in Indiana in the
1850s. And a map shows this very well. Here's the railroads in Ohio and Indiana in 1850. Here's a map
of the railroads in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois in 1860 in 10 years.
Indianapolis, which didn't exist in 1820, has become a railroad center. Chicago, of course, Toledo,
Cincinnati, and Bloomington had its railroad as well. This is a railroad map of Indiana from 1858, and
it shows how the railroad came through the county, close to Harrodsburg, but then mainly
Smithville is a new railroad town. Bloomington is the main town on the line. It goes through Ellitsville
and then on north. And neither Mount Tabor nor Fairfax is on it. So the city then grew in a different
way because of the railroad. This is another railroad scene that as it looks today at 7th Street, that's
the beeline trail and a parking lot.
This is what it looked like in 1980, the remnants of a very large flour mill. And flour milling took
off in Bloomington because of the railroad. This is a scene, aerial scene of that center of town. Land
transportation and power in Bloomington. Well, in the county, it was water, water, water, but in Bloomington,
transportation is gonna now be
rail. No water needed for that except, as we'll see, to power the steam locomotives. And the power was
derived from coal. What railroads did is not only brought people and things in and out of the city,
but the main thing it did was bring coal into the city, cheap power for a revolution in manufacturing.
So this mill
is the culmination of many decades of milling on this site. This is a fire insurance map from the 1880s
that shows the Bloomington Milling Company. That's what you were looking at there. And it's a very modern
mill with the most modern kinds of milling equipment. They advertise Collins and Carcell's Mill
is the roller mill process. This was the best, newest kind of milling that was being done on machines
that were manufactured by the other railroad centers in the Midwest and places like Cincinnati
and Indianapolis. Nordyke and Marmon became one of the largest producers of milling equipment in the
United States and in the world, really.
That was in Indianapolis. And their factory in Indianapolis was where Lilly is now, the campus of Lilly's
manufacturing on Kentucky Avenue is where Nordyke Marmon was as early as 1876. This was a big manufacturing
operation making the machines for places like Bloomington to use. The other, the key machine is the
small dependable
mass-manufactured steam, stationary steam engine. And where did they make these? They made them in places
like, well, Indianapolis. Atlas Steam Engine Works was one of the largest manufacturers of steam engines
in the country. So this is an area-wide industrial revolution brought on by, largely by rail,
These companies could be in Indianapolis because Indianapolis is a railroad city and could bring coal
in and take machines out. And Bloomington was part of that process. The Collins and Carcell Mill advertised
itself as building a new story. It will assume Chicagoan proportions, it said, if this is kept up.
Well, it shows what the demands of business are in the Chicago of southern Indiana. So that's what,
whoa, Bloomington, that little, that's Bloomington, the Chicago of southern Indiana. What about Fairfax?
What happened to Fairfax? Remember these guys? Well, they moved to Bloomington. I mean, what else was
there to do? The railroad came to Bloomington, so did the Hilton's. And they went into, to,
various kinds of wholesale and retail dry goods, as well as milling, and bought a nice house on Rogers
Street, which still sits there at Rogers and 8th. And that is where their mill was, at 6th Street in
the railroad. It looked like this on a fire insurance map. This is before they
This was actually after they had taken it over, I think, but it shows Clear Creek there channelized
as a water source there on the left of the mill, and it shows the railroad on the right side of the
mill, right downtown. The downtown area of Bloomington was mainly strung out along the railroad, and
the railroad followed the central branch of Clear Creek. There was some manufacturing also
in the area of Lincoln and Fourth Street and Grant Street using water from the campus river, which it's
hard to see now, it's underground, but it flowed right where the, well, it's where the fire department
is at the corner of Lincoln and Fourth Street, which is why the fire department was ruined when it was
flooded a few years ago and had to be rebuilt. So that stream is completely underwater. The only thing left
From that area is Bruce Storm's house, the realtor, which was built in the 1850s. And first from a woolen
mill manufacturer. And then William Dill, one of the main millers in town, lived in that house. And
Dill and Breadwell took over the mill on 6th Street.
brought it into being a very important downtown business. This is an interesting ad for that particular
mill advertising Swan Down Flower brand name. And you might think, well, isn't that Swans Down? Is that
the name? Swans Down is the name of the real product that was manufactured in Evansville by the Eagleheart Company.
This is a rip-off. This is a knock-off of swans down. You can still buy swans down cake flour, but you
can't buy swan down flour anymore. This is what that mill looked like in its old days. And this is John
Breadwell's house on North Washington Street. I mean, it's what it looks like today. Breadwell's an
interesting character because it came from Avocca, a little town in Lawrence County. And Avocca,
has a nice cave spring. This is it, the way it looks today. But that's not good enough in the post-Civil
War era. Steam is better than water. And Bridwell abandoned his dad down there in Aboca and went first
to Bedford and then to Bloomington to carry the milling business into the era of steam. And the era
of coal. Coal is
used by everybody in Bloomington. The Seward Company adds a coal engine. They put the horse out to pasture
and switched to coal and steam for running the bellows and the forage. This is the Seward Company on
Walnut Street, and then they moved to West 8th Street. Another east side company from before the railroad
age is the Showers Company, which was a
9th and Grant Street and they had a good business there. This burned in the 1880s and they moved to
the west side and continued to add on with these kinds of buildings well into the 20th century. So this
is from the 18, I think it's 1884, this particular picture. The showers
company eventually expanded all the way from 8th Street up to 11th Street. So here's a letterhead from
the showers company. You've seen pictures like this before of the big campus for furniture manufacturing
that they developed in Bloomington. I like this one. It's a typical engraving from the late 19th century that
plays up how black their smoke was from their boilers because they burned a hell of a lot of coal to
make this furniture and they wanted you to know it. The other business that came into Bloomington at
this time solely dependent on the railroad was the limestone milling business. This is a map from the
early 20th century that shows the mills along the railroad corridor from
first street all the way down to Grimes Lane and even farther south as well, down past Grimes and along
the railroad yards. These were all mills that depended entirely on steam machinery and coal. This is
an aerial view in the 20th century of these mills. That's right through the middle there is Grimes Lane.
The road on the right is Walnut.
And those are the mills, stone mills near the railroad yard that was developing in the late 19th century.
One of the families that was very important in the limestone trade was Hoadley. This is their mill between
Grimes and Allen.
If you look at, if we look at this closely, you can see its relationship obviously with the railroad.
It's right on the railroad. This is by the, where the junk, where the car junkyard is now. But they've
got a special track, a switch running in there just to deliver coal, coal shed, coal dump, powerhouse,
and everything is run by coal fired steam.
Land transportation and power for the city of Bloomington, for the county, was water, water, water.
For the city of Bloomington, it was mainly manufacturing the raw materials, was wood and stone brought
in by rail, transportation by rail, and steam power with coal brought in by rail. So rail, Bloomington
was where it is as a central place. It had no real natural claim
geographically for manufacturing. Everything was human political geography. And it all involved bringing
things into the city. And coal was the key. Now, this is sort of the end of the story, because the 20th
century is a big story of its own. And I want to stop this soon, but I'll give you a little bit of a
look into the 20th century. But coal is the key thing here.
political and human geography trumps physical geography in a place like Bloomington. But the key thing
that was missing for Bloomington was water. They didn't need water for transportation. They didn't need
it for power. But they kind of did. Steam is water. All of the work
involved water that Bloomington didn't have, and that was the constraint on Bloomington's development
by the late 19th century. As early as 1883, the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map publishing company and their
logo here rates Bloomington's water facilities as not good. That's an understatement. They were pretty
terrible, and they got
I mean, a nice spring is a lovely thing, but it's not good enough for large-scale manufacturing. So
what happened? I'll give you five minutes here of looking ahead. I guess the big picture of what happened
in the 20th century is limestone mills become wedding venues. But it's more complicated than that.
Here's an aerial view of industrial Bloomington in the early 20th century. The street across the bottom
there is Fairview. We're looking east from Fairview Street across the Shawnee Central Limestone Mill,
which is now the Bloomington Iron and Metal Scrapyard. We're looking across that. We look across the
railroad where it curves.
and crosses Rogers Street to the enormous campus of showers that extends all the way from 8th to 11th
Street. So that's Bloomington at its peak. The limestone industry, showers, everybody, IU, they all
complained about the lack of good, reliable water. This is what the Shawnee Central Limestone Mill looks
like today.
Just a few scraps of the superstructure of the mill in the scrap yard now of BIM, Bloomington Iron and
Metal. Here's another view. If you look closely, you can see there's actually some stone on that wall
that's still standing, but that's what it looks like today. The only mill I think that is kind of intact
is a later one, a Hoadley Mill that's on Walnut
and Miller Drive. The only thing that's in there now is CrossFit. But it still has a roof. It still
has its walls. Inside, it's pretty junky. All of the limestone industry moved out of town in the 20th
century. And the corridor of limestone mills is now completely something different.
One of the buildings that still stands right down on Walnut Street at Dodds is the office of the Bloomington
Limestone Company, and it's now the office of Lent-Lauren Wood Builders. Another building that still
stands is an office building of the Fagan Stone Company that's along at Dodds.
beeline trail by hopscotch coffee. There were quarries in the city at one time. Those are almost entirely
gone, filled in, and disappeared. This is one at the edge of the city. I think it may be in the city
limits now. It's a Woolery quarry. But quarrying has moved out into the countryside. The only quarry
that I know of
deep within the heart of the city is this quarry that's a long hillside, a hillside and highland in
the old Sarkis-Tarsian estate that hasn't been filled in or attached, but there were others in town.
Showers, some of the building
The main building still exists and repurposed as City Hall and as a business center, but Showers is
gone. The story of what happened to the limestone business in the city and to Showers is for another
day. The railroads. Well, one of the railroads, this one that was built in 1906 is still there. It's
just right outside the window here. When you go out in the parking lot, you can look down and see it.
That's where I took this picture.
right by the Legion Hall here, still runs to the east-west. But the main railroad in town is gone. This
is a view of McDowell Yards from Grimes Lane. That's Grimes Lane there across the middle, looking down
with a warehouse on one side and a small building on the other. This is what that scene looks like today
with Beeline Trail going overhead across Grimes.
the railroad in the limestone mill district where the mills have been replaced by downtown houses and
coffee shop, that's hopscotch coffee at Dodds. So what about water? Okay, a little bit on water and
then I'll let you go. The key to finally to getting water and it's a complicated one was Griffey, Griffey
Lake in the 1920s.
was a lake that held water, and water could be moved into the city. This was the salvation of Bloomington.
Even when Griffey got small, another lake was built on Bean Blossom Creek to the east, the northeast
limit. This is a scene of Lake Lemon from Riddle Point. And then, of course, Lake Monroe, the biggest
reservoir in the state. And this is Fairfax. That pointed area there is where the village was.
and now Fairfax is in Marina. And what I want to end with though here is a failed scheme, which is the
Twin Lakes Reservoir of 1890s. And this is one of the Twin Lakes. It still has some water in it, but
these lakes leaked and it never worked well. But the effort to do this brought Bloomington into the
modern age of being an industrial city.
everything then was replaced by human geography and that is bringing water from some other watershed
into the city along with natural resources and coal. This is the main lake of Twin Lakes now converted
into softball fields and I stand up on the hillside there imagining my car down there under water but
all the water's leaked out and Twin Lakes has been
drained long ago. But there was a time, this is the pump house at Twin Lakes in 1895, when this was
to be a state of the art of a fully human choices of geography, trumping natural geography, bringing
water up over the hills into the city of Bloomington with steam powered pumps. And so the last picture
I'll show you here, is the one I showed you before. This is one of the sources of Twin Lakes. This is
the spring that's sometimes called the East Stony Creek of the two main springs that tried their best
to fill Twin Lakes. I love this picture, not only because my granddaughter's in it, but because it shows
Bloomington in three eras. One is,
This is what water looked like in Bloomington in 1820. This was then the second era. This is what water
looked like when it poured into the Twin Lakes Reservoir to boost industry in the city. That's all gone
now. And this is what it looks like today. So many things have changed in Bloomington. Many things are
completely gone. But some things have remained. And this is one of them.
That's it.