Robert G. Barrows and Leigh Darbee

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Robert G. Barrows and Leigh Darbee | The Urban Frontier in Pioneer Indiana | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

The Urban Frontier in Pioneer Indiana

One of the central themes of Richard Wade's The Urban Frontier—that the "growth of urbanism was an important part of the occupation of the West"—has been reflected in Indiana historiography only occasionally. Donald F. Carmony's examination of the state from 1816 to mid-century is definitive on constitutional, financial, political, and transportation topics, but is much less informative concerning social and urban history; indeed, Wade's book does not appear in Carmony's bibliography. In his one-volume history of the state, The Indiana Way, James H. Madison echoes Wade when he writes: "Towns were an essential part of frontier development ... providing essential services to the rural and agricultural majority of Indiana's population."¹ When one considers the history of cities and towns in pioneer Indiana in relation to Wade's classic work, a "generation gap" becomes readily apparent. Developments in Indiana (and, notably, in Indianapolis, the closest comparison to the cities Wade examined) run two or three decades behind his discussion of urbanism in the Ohio Valley. Wade begins his book in 1790 (ten years prior to the creation of Indiana Territory) and concludes his Part I in 1815, one year before Indiana became a state. He ends his narrative in 1830, at which point Indiana's new capital city was less than a decade old. In that year Cincinnati had a population of almost 25,000 and Louisville claimed approximately 10,000—and both were situated on a major transportation corridor.² Indianapolis, with at most 1,900 residents and probably several hundred fewer, remained at the time an "isolated outpost, poorly connected with the settled portions of the state."³ Even the state's largest cities were much smaller than the communities Wade examined. Indeed, in simple numerical terms, when Indiana joined the Union in 1816 the state scarcely had an urban component at all. To be sure, several extant towns—Vincennes, Corydon, Madison—played important roles in the state's early political and economic life, but these were still very small places in 1816, well below the threshold of 2,500 residents necessary today to be classified as an "urban place" in the census.	1
The situation did not change much during the first twenty-five years of statehood. There were many new towns established in the aftermath of the New Purchase of 1818, as migrants began to surge northward from the Ohio River and new counties (requiring county seats) were created. But in both 1820 and 1830 less than 1 percent of Indiana's residents could be classified as urban, even if the technical definition is abandoned. Geographer Stephen Visher, an early student of the state's nascent urban network, observed that "there were few towns in much of south central and central Indiana until after 1825, and few in northern Indiana until after 1840."⁴ By 1840 a mere 1.6 percent of Hoosiers lived in places reporting 2,500 or more inhabitants. If the census criterion is applied, then just three cities accounted for the state's entire urban population: New Albany (4,226), Madison (3,798), and Indianapolis (2,692). "That Indiana was a rural state in 1840 can scarcely be doubted," observe two well-known historians, "but the lack of urban centers may not be fully realized."⁵	2
Population statistics, however, do not tell the whole story. The cities, towns, and villages of Indiana's pioneer era had an importance belied by their modest size. These "wedge[s] of urbanism ... driven into the backwoods" served critical economic, governmental, and social functions, and did in fact provide "the central experience of many settlers." R. Carlyle Buley argued that life in the villages and country towns of the Old Northwest "differed but little" from life in the surrounding countryside. Perhaps—but it did differ.⁶	. . .

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