Blue Roads of America: Indiana

I am not a fan of travel writing, but in the 1970s, while living in the USA, I enjoyed enormously a book by William Least Heat Moon, Blue Roads of America. His idea was to travel only on minor roads marked on maps in blue (the equivalent of British B roads or French D roads). For the last decade or so of my publishing career I worked closely with W. W. Norton, a fine employee-owned publishing house, in New York. The president of Norton, Drake McFeely, used to joke that I visited places in his country that he had never visited. I did not always drive on blue roads, but I came across many of the kinds of places that fascinated Least Heat Moon.

 

Newburgh, Indiana

Newburgh's claim to fame

I was a frequent visitor to Newburgh, Indiana, where it became a tradition that I would treat the family of my friend and author Ralph Larmann to a fish supper at The Tin Fish. Newburgh, home to some 3,300 people, ranges along the banks of the Ohio River, on the other side of which is Kentucky. The original Newburgh was founded in 1829 by Abner Luce. In 1841 the town merged with its neighbour to the east, Sprinklesburgh, founded, by a business man named John Sprinkle. Newburgh had two assets: its riverside location and a seam of coal to power steamboats. It soon became one of the largest ports on the Ohio, until, the railroad diverted business to nearby Evansville.

Adam R. Johnson

Newburgh’s claim to historical fame is that on 18 July 1862 it was the first town north of the Mason Dixon Line to surrender, rather ignominiously I must say, to the Confederates. The leader of the Newburgh Raid was Brigadier General Adam R. Johnson, the inventor of the Quaker cannon, first deployed in the capture of Newburgh. Johnson made two fake cannons from a blackened log and a stove pipe, placed on a hill on the Kentucky side of the river. The threat of Johnson’s “artillery” persuaded the Union commander of Newburgh’s garrison to surrender without firing a shot. Johnson is known to history as “Stove Pipe” Johnson.

 

Johnson's Quaker cannons aimed at Newburgh

The Harmonist granary at New Harmony

About 50 miles northwest of Newburgh is New Harmony, a town of fewer than 800 people, on the banks of the Wabash River, a tributary of the Ohio. In 1814 some 800 pietist Harmonists from Württenburg in Germany, led by George Rapp, bought 30,000 acres of land in the Indiana woods and named their town Harmony. The plan was to live in Christian perfection, in a highly ordered community, while they awaited the imminent second coming of Christ. The Rappites, as they were known, were industrious and soon were exporting agricultural produce and high quality wares down the Wabash to the Ohio and on to national and international markets. Chastity was obligatory. Unmarried men and women lived in separate dormitories. Couples with children who joined the group lived in family homes, but were required to become celibate. After 10 years, the Rappites decided to move on. They bought land on the Ohio, eighteen miles from Pittsburgh. The move was financed by selling Harmony to a Welsh utopian socialist, Robert Owen in 1825.

 

Richard Meier, the Atheneum Visitors Center, New Harmony

Owen had experimented with socialist ideas of running industrial enterprises in New Lanark, near Glasgow. He changed his American town’s name to New Harmony. Owen’s partner in his new enterprise was William McClure, a wealthy geologist, who attracted a number of prominent scholars and educationalists to New Harmony. Although Owen abandoned his experiment after only two years, New Harmony lived on as a centre of scholarship and learning. The town had a Thespian Society, a Jockey Club, and the Minerva Society, a literary club for young women. Today New Harmony survives as a cultural and historic centre run by the University of Southern Indiana. The Atheneum Visitors Center was designed by Richard Meier. Another distinguished architect, Philip Johnson, designed the New Harmony Roofless Church, an interdenominational space whose focus is a statue of The Descent of the Holy Spirit by Jacques Lipschitz.

 

Philip Johnson, New Harmony Roofless Church

Indiana War Memorial

Not exactly at the end of a blue road is Indianapolis, the state capital. The city proudly claims to be a patriotic city, with more monuments and memorials than any US city except for Washington, D.C. General John Pershing laid the cornerstone of the Indiana War Memorial, a huge building modelled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, built in modern-day Turkey between 350 and 353BC as a tomb for Mausolus, a Persian Satrap, and his wife Artemisia II. Inside the memorial is a museum devoted to the USS Indianapolis, the ship that carried enriched uranium for Little Boy, the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, to the US Air Force base on Tinian Island. Soon after leaving the island, the Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine. Hundreds of sailors died.

 

A scale model of the radio room of the USS Indianapolis

A curious item in the museum is a list of Indiana Firsts, that have nothing to do with the history of the Indianapolis. One first was the serving of the first Bloody Mary in the state in French Lick, a spa town. In the early 20^th century its casinos attracted many celebrities, including Joe Louis, Irving Berlin and Al Capone.

Terre Haute railroad station

Another Indiana city with a French connection is Terre Haute, in the 19^th century an important rail hub. I was told by a Norton colleague who lived there that bank robbers avoided Terre Haute because the railway tracks ran through the centre of town. A passing train could ruin the robber’s getaway plans.

About 60 miles northeast of Indianapolis, is Muncie, known as the most studied city in the USA because it was the subject a large-scale sociological study begun in 1920. I visited Muncie several times to talk to professors in the art department of Ball State University. The university takes its name from its main benefactors, the Ball family, founders of the most important business in Muncie’s history. The five brothers (William Charles, Frank Clayton, Lucius Lorenzo, Edmund Burke and George Alexander) founded their business in 1880 making home canning glass jars, known as Ball jars.

 

Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana

Like many industrialists of their time, the Ball family were collectors of art. The university art museum is named after David T Owsley, grandson of Frank, and an art historian who worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the V&A in London, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Frank seems to have started the family passion for art collecting by chance. In 1918 he and two of his daughters were in an elevator in the Plaza Hotel in New York. Frank asked the elevator operator why there was a large crowd on the ballroom floor. The operator replied that they had gathered for the auction of the works owned by a recently deceased collector. Frank had recently undergone eye surgery and was delighted that he could see clearly the art on sale, so he bought 70 paintings.

 

J. Ottis Adams, Nooning (The Gleaners), oil on canvas, 1886

Frank’s brother-in-law was the Hoosier Impressionist J. Ottis Adams, several of whose works are in.  the museum collection. Indianans are known as hoosiers, a nickname that dates back to at least 1830, but whose exact derivation is uncertain and the subject of many speculative explanations, not all of them flattering to hoosiers. One explanation attributes the term to the pugnacious character of early settlers who were fond of biting off the ears of opponents in a fight. Finding an ear on the floor of a tavern from last night’s fight, the question would be “Whose era”, hence hoosier. Another pugilistic explanation is that the state’s Ohio riverboat men  regularly succeeded in “hushing” (or trouncing) their opponents, and so were known as “hushers” which later became hoosiers.

Fortunately, on none of my visits to the Ohio waterfront in Evansville and Newburgh did I encounter any pugnacious hoosiers.