Indiana. It’s spanned by vast fields of
corn and soybeans, making it one of the most agriculturally productive states in the
country. Stunning sand dunes, one of the only national parks in the Midwest, stand hundreds
of feet tall over the shore of Lake Michigan, and beautiful forests, hills, and river valleys
cover much of the state’s southern half. Home to a major city, a number of smaller ones,
as well as the suburbs of one of the largest metropolises in the world, it’s home to a fairly
large population. A former industrial powerhouse, whose limestone and steel built some of the
country’s most famous buildings, it today maintains an important role in the country.
Indiana is a unique and fascinating state, and the twentieth place I will cover in the
US explained, a 56 part series on every state, territory, and federal district in the country,
by order of admission. Hello and welcome to That Is Interesting. I’m your host Carter. This is
the US Explained. Episode twenty - Indiana. (intro) According to the Koppen Climate Classification,
the long, thin state is divided almost perfectly in half between two climate zones, the southern
half in the humid subtropical climate zone, with hot summers, mild winters, and humidity,
and the northern half in the cooler hot summer humid continental climate zone, with four distinct
seasons, hot summers, and cold winters. It’s just about in the middle in terms of rainfall, getting
on average 41.86 inches of precipitation a year, which places it at 27th out of the 50 states.
The southern half of the state generally gets a little more precipitation than the northern half.
It’s divided between two time zones as well. Most of the state sits in Eastern Time, including its
largest city, Indianapolis, but the northwestern and southwestern corners are both in Central
Time. Both are due to the location of cities there near state lines. In the Northwest, suburbs
of Chicago like Gary, Hammond, and Portage sit not far from the Illinois border. Nearly 700,000
people live in Chicago’s Indiana suburbs, and 50,000 of them commute across state lines every
day for work. With the region revolving around a city in another state, it wouldn’t make sense to
divide some of Chicago’s suburbs into a different time zone, so they’re located in Central. It’s
a similar situation with southwestern Indiana, the corner of which juts out in between Illinois
and Kentucky. The Indiana city of Evansville is located there, not far from the other two states,
so it and a number of surrounding counties are in central as well. Though these corners take up
very little of Indiana’s land, over 17% of its population is in a different time zone from most
of the state. It’s nicknamed the Hoosier State, and people from Indiana are officially known
as Hoosiers. It’s the only official state demonym that isn’t based off of the state’s
name, and it’s a term Hoosiers are proud of, and you’ll never really hear anyone from Indiana
call themselves Indianans or anything else. No one can seem to agree on how the term Hoosier
came to be, and there are a number of different theories that the Indiana state government lists,
such as it coming from a Native American word for corn that might not exist, being the last name
of a boat owner who liked to hire workers from Indiana, being a shortened version of “who’s
here?” when people would knock on cabin doors, or even “whose ear?” after bar fights broke out.
The theory that I found most compelling, and that the state government lists as the most probable,
traces it to the Saxon word for hill - hoo. In Cumberland, a region in the north of
England just south of the Scottish border, this word for hill became hoozer. Immigrants from
Cumberland, the theory goes, brought the word with them to the United States, where it turned into
Hoosier and came to be used for people who live in the hills. In the hilly southern part of Indiana,
the word caught on and locals started using it to refer to themselves. I’m sure there are many
other theories as well. If you’re from Indiana, go let me know in the comments where you
think the word Hoosier originated from. As a lot of early highways and routes west
crossed through Indiana, you’ll also hear it nicknamed “the Crossroads of America.” The
word Indiana comes from the term Indians, a misnomer for the indigenous people of the
Americas that was given by Christopher Columbus, who had been trying to reach what Europeans called
the Indies. The Indies referred to all of Asia from India all the way to countries like Malaysia,
Indonesia, and the Philippines. That’s where Columbus initially thought he landed, and called
the local native people “Indians,” a term that was used for much of history but has fallen out
of use considering it’s incorrect and confusing. Even today, the islands of the Caribbean are
collectively called the West Indies. In 1763, the powerful Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois
Confederacy, set aside a section of land they’d conquered in what is now West
Virginia for a land company from Philadelphia. The company referenced the Iroqouis in naming
this section of land, calling it Indiana, or the land of the Indians. Virginia, whose
colonial claims were enormous, disputed it, and won out over the so named Indiana Land
Company. Eventually though, as the US was breaking up the massive lands once claimed by
Virginia, they needed names for the new states and territories. In the case of Indiana, they took
up the name of the former Indiana Land Company, even though they had not used the name for the
same land. If you’ve seen other videos in the US Explained you know I’m not a fan of the state
seal on blue background design. Which Indiana does not do! Though it has the dark blue background
which is pretty overused, there's no state seal, and it has a simple and recognizable design that
looks good and makes it stand out. All in gold, it shows a torch for liberty with rays of light
shooting out, and 19 stars in various rings around it, as Indiana was the 19th state, and
it says Indiana in very small writing. I think it’s a really nice flag, in my opinion one of
the better state flag designs in the country. Indiana takes up 35,826 square miles, or 92,788
square kilometers. This places it on the smaller side, at 38th out of the 50 states, and all the
states that border it are larger. It’s slightly smaller than Kentucky and slightly larger than
Maine. Its population, however, is on the larger side. With 6.79 million people, it ranks 17th out
of the 50 states, less people than Tennessee but more than Maryland. Home to a large city,
a number of smaller cities, rural areas that are fairly heavily populated as well as the
suburbs of a number of major out of state cities, Indiana has a population density that’s on the
higher side. With 189 residents per square mile, or 73 per square kilometer, it sits at 16th
out of the 50 states, with a lower population density than North Carolina but a higher one
than Georgia. Indiana sits in the north central part of the Eastern half of the US, in the region
known as the Midwest. It’s also part of the region known as the Rust Belt, a former powerhouse of
industrial cities and towns surrounding the Great Lakes which has since seen some of the most severe
population decline and job loss in the country in recent decades as industrial jobs were replaced
by automation and outsourced overseas. Gary, once a major city that was one of the largest
cities in the state and a huge center of steel manufacturing, has also been one of the hardest
hit places by the decline of the Rust Belt, seeing its population decrease by 61%, one of the
highest rates of any city in the country, so much so that much of its downtown is abandoned and
in ruins, and it’s often seen as the epitome of industrial decline in America and the issues the
Rust Belt faces. Overall though, Indiana is faring better than most of its Rust Belt neighbors.
While states like Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have seen a much more stagnant,
plateauing population, Indiana saw the same trends but in the last few decades has seen its
population increase again pretty significantly, making it a bit of a regional outlier. It’s been
powered by growth in Indianapolis and its suburbs, as well as the suburbs of Louisville and growth
in smaller cities like Fort Wayne and Lafayette. It borders four other states and has a shore
on a Great Lake. To its east sits Ohio, to its south Kentucky, to its west Illinois, and to
its north sits Michigan as well as Lake Michigan. Indiana’s borders are fairly simple. Its
border with Illinois starts at Lake Michigan, the north-south border dividing Chicago from the
Indiana suburb of Hammond. It actually continues for three and a half miles out into the lake, so
if you’re in this park in Chicago and walk out onto the breakwater, you’ll eventually reach
a tiny pene-exclave of Indiana. It continues through the Chicago suburbs and through the rural
agricultural parts of the states for 163 miles or 262 kilometers until it reaches the Wabash River
just downstream of Terre Haute. From there it follows the Wabash southwest until it meets its
mouth in the Ohio River, forming a point. On the other side of the Ohio sits Kentucky. The border
follows the winding course of the river upstream, generally flowing from east to west, though
Kentucky typically owns most of the River itself. It passes through the city of Evansville
and later turns to the northeast, dividing the Kentucky city of Louisville from suburbs on the
Indiana side like Jeffersonville and Clarksville. At the mouth of the Great Miami River, it becomes
a north-south border with Ohio. The city limits of Cincinnati sit just five miles away on the other
side of the border and a few suburbs on the very edge sit on the Indiana side, the loop of highways
around the city dipping into the state for a tiny bit. From the Ohio River, the Indiana-Ohio
border is a straight line north for 179 miles, or 288 kilometers. It then becomes a north-south
border with Michigan for just 4 and a half miles until a spot near the town of Clear Lake where it
turns west, with Michigan sitting to the north of the state. It continues west for 104 miles or 167
kilometers until it reaches the shores of Lake Michigan at the town of Michiana Shores, created
from combining the names of Michigan and Indiana, and directly across the border from the Michigan
town of Michiana. It then continues across the lake as a water border for 36 miles or 58
kilometers, until it reaches the north-south part of the Illinois border not far from Chicago. The
border, though, switches from Michigan to Illinois about halfway across the lake, with Illinois
water sitting north of Indiana for a ways. The long and thin state is geographically quite
different from north to south, and that’s visible in the culture of its different regions as well.
The northern two thirds are flat and agricultural, smoothed over by glaciers that left behind rich
soil that has turned it into an agricultural powerhouse. Corn and soybeans are grown there
across the northern and central parts of the state and it’s the eighth largest agricultural producer
in the entire country. Like much of the Midwest, this flat land and fertile soil has meant that not
only is most of the region dominated by cropland, but you can easily build a house nearly
anywhere. This has left much of Indiana dotted with small towns as well as a number of
smaller cities. There’s less true wilderness here, in rural areas it’s generally no more than a ten
or fifteen minute drive from one small town to the next, and even outside of the towns you’re
rarely very far from your neighbors at all. The state is home to a number of major rivers -
the Ohio in the south, and in the flat lands of the north, water flows in a number of different
directions. The St. Joseph flows into Lake Michigan, the Kankakee into the Illinois River and
then on to the Mississippi, and the Maumee flows into Lake Erie. Much of the state is dominated by
one large tributary of the Ohio. The Wabash River, fed by other rivers like the White River and the
Tippecanoe, starts just across the border in Ohio, flows across the north central part of the
state, and then along its western edge, eventually forming its western border. Most of
the state sits within the watershed of the Wabash. The northern third of the state is home to
Indiana’s lakeshore. It sits right on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, a strategic location that
was important in its development. The lakeshore is home to the beautiful Indiana Dunes, a string
of impressive sand dunes beside the lake that are one of just five national parks located in the
Midwest, the only national park in the state, and one of the newest in the country. I’ve been
to the Indiana Dunes and they’re certainly worth a visit. Nicknamed the Region, the area around
the southern tip of Lake Michigan is also a huge population center. Chicago, the third largest
city in the country and one of the largest in the world, sits just across the border in
Illinois, and its suburbs, such as Gary, Hammond, Portage, Merrillville, East Chicago, and Whiting
stretch into the northwestern corner of Indiana. Altogether, the Chicago suburbs in Indiana are
home to 673,000 people, making it collectively the second largest urban area in the state.
Surrounding it are a number of smaller cities that haven’t yet become absorbed into the Chicago
suburbs, like Valparaiso, La Porte, and Michigan City, but are well within the orbit of the city.
There’s also a number of other smaller and medium sized cities in the northern part of Indiana.
South Bend and Elkhart sit on the St. Joseph River in the very north of the state not far from the
Michigan border. The suburbs of the two smaller cities overlap and even stretch into Michigan.
Home to the famous University of Notre Dame, South Bend is the third largest urban area centered
within the state, home to 279,000 people in it and its suburbs. Elkhart sits at number 6 with 148,000
residents. Fort Wayne sits at the headwaters of the Maumee River in the northeastern part of the
state, not far from Ohio. Home to 336,000 people, it’s the second most populous urban area centered
within the state; the Chicago suburbs are home to more people, and it’s a nice smaller sized but
fast growing city that serves as the urban core of northeastern Indiana. Northern Indiana’s also
home to other smaller cities and larger towns like Goshen, Plymouth, Logansport, Huntington, and
Auburn. Northern Indiana was initially settled by people of mostly British ancestry moving
west from New England, and they’ve left their mark culturally. Northern Indiana feels very
distinct from the more culturally southern south of the state, as well as from Central
Indiana. It’s also the part of the state that really feels like the Rust Belt. It sits on
the Great Lakes. Cities like Gary, Whiting, Hammond, and South Bend were major centers of
industry, and it’s culturally got a lot in common with other parts of the industrial Great Lakes
like Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland, influenced by Black migrants from the South, as
well as Poles and other Eastern Europeans, and Irish immigrants who came to work in industrial
jobs in Northern Indiana cities. Though it’s seen population decline in the past, generally Northern
Indiana is generally doing pretty well, and is beginning to grow again, especially in Fort Wayne.
Central Indiana revolves around the state’s capital and by far its largest city, Indianapolis.
A planned city in the center of the state, on the White River, it’s home to 1.7 million
people in it and its suburbs, making it the most populous urban area in Indiana and the 32nd
largest in the country, smaller than Cleveland but larger than Cincinnati. The Indianapolis
suburbs are the wealthiest part of the state, and the whole urban area is fast growing, having
driven most of the state’s increase in population in recent decades. A number of other smaller
cities are spread throughout Central Indiana. Lafayette, a college town across the Wabash River
from Purdue University, is home to 157,000 people, making it the fifth largest city in the state.
There’s also Terre Haute, not far from Illinois on the Wabash River, as well as Muncie, New Castle,
Kokomo, and Anderson. Still agricultural but with less of an industrial feel than the north,
Central Indiana culturally and geographically feels very much like the classic Midwest, and it’s
generally fast growing and economically strong, though outside of Indianapolis and Lafayette,
it’s seeing rural population decline. The southern third of Indiana is a really
interesting cultural mix of Midwestern and Southern. It’s also the most unique part of the
state geographically. Hills begin to rise up and much of the southern part of the state, such as
the scenic Brown County, is covered in forest. You might not think of forests or hills when you
imagine Indiana but the state, and the Midwest overall, has a lot more geographic diversity and
regional differences than people often give it credit for. It’s generally a mix of rolling hills,
forests, and farmland not unlike neighboring Kentucky, and in fact it shares a lot of cultural
similarities to Kentucky. Sitting on the Ohio River just across from Louisville, it similarly
has one foot in the Midwest and one in the South. Much of the region, for example, was settled by
Scots-Irish Southerners, whose ancestors came west through Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
Its largest city is Evansville, the fourth largest urban area in the state, home to 207,000 people
in it and its suburbs. It sits on the southwestern edge of the state, right on the Ohio River
across from Kentucky and not far from Illinois. Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, sits right
across the river from Indiana. Slightly smaller at 203,000, the Louisville suburbs stretch across
the river. The Indiana cities of Jeffersonville and Clarksville sit right across from downtown
Louisville, so they very much feel like a part of the city, and are culturally and economically
tied together. The Ohio River is the main artery of the region and a huge population center.
Many of Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio’s largest cities sit along the river, their urban areas
stretching between states, and a number of cities, large and small, sit either within Indiana
or across from it, with suburbs stretching in. These urban areas sit right on both sides of
the traditional north-south border, and because of that, the cities, and the rural areas on
both sides of them, such as Southern Indiana, are a fascinating cultural mix of Southern and
Midwestern. On the Indiana side is Evansville, and right across from it is the Kentucky city of
Louisville as well as the smaller Owensboro. Even a few of the suburbs of Cincinnati stretch across
the border into Indiana. Away from the river and closer to Indianapolis, just west of the hills
of Brown County, Bloomington is the 7th largest urban area in the state, home to 110,000 people.
It’s a college town, home to Indiana University, a beautiful campus made of Indiana limestone,
and it’s a fun, popular small city with beautiful natural areas right at its doorstep. On the other
side of the hills, the small city of Columbus is basically an architect’s playground. Industrialist
J. Irwin Miller, whose Cummins Corporation was based in the city, knew that when he was making
job offers to potential new employees, Columbus wasn’t a particularly appealing place to live,
the city was in decay and struggling. The wealthy Miller loved modern architecture, and set out to
transform the town into an architecture showcase, offering to pay all architect fees for any
buildings designed by famous modern architects. Architects such as I.M. Pei and Eero
Saarinen designed stunning new buildings that transformed the city. Today, it’s been
listed as the sixth most architecturally significant city in the United States, and is
one of the fastest growing places in Indiana. What is now Indiana was originally home to a
number of different indigenous peoples. Ancient peoples such as the Mississippians built large
cities home to massive earthen mounds, such as the Angel Mounds near Evansville. They were followed
by peoples such as the Potawotami and Peoria in the north, the Wea in the west, the Osage in the
south, and the Miami, Kickapoo, and Kaskaskia in much of the region. As European colonists
arrived in North America, they brought with them diseases such as smallpox, which the native
people of the continent had not been exposed to, and as such had little immunity. Disease decimated
the continent’s indigenous population, killing 90% of them, and those that survived often died at the
hands of colonists, as Europeans expanded their settlement westward. A confederation of Iroquoian
peoples in what is now Upstate New York, known as the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, built
a fur trading empire, invading a swath of the continent as far west as Illinois. Local tribes
fought back, in a bloody conflict known as the Beaver Wars, but eventually the Iroquois took
control, and the region became part of a large hunting and trapping ground. Meanwhile, on the
Atlantic coast, as European colonial settlement grew, the native people there fled west, many
settling in what is now Indiana. Tribes such as the Shawnee from what is now Pennsylvania,
the Lenape, who lived in Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the Mohicans, from
upstate New York, the Wyandot from Ontario, and the Nanticoke from Maryland all fled into Indiana.
The first Europeans to colonize the region were the French, who made it part of an enormous colony
they called Canada. This section of Canada was mostly used for fur trading, aside from a few
forts at places like Vincennes to keep control of French interests, few French settlers actually
moved to Indiana. For the most part, they allied themselves with the local native people and traded
with them for valuable furs. British settlers, though initially confined to the Atlantic coast,
were pushing west across the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley. A strategic location, the Ohio River
was as far east as a tributary of the Mississippi River reached, and control of the river would
allow Britain access to the resource-rich interior of the continent. War broke out between Britain
on one side and France and Spain on the other, with various native peoples allied with each side.
Called the French and Indian War, Britain won, and took control of the colony of Canada, which
they renamed Quebec. Conflicts between native people and the British engulfed the region,
such as Pontiac’s Rebellion, and Britain, not wanting to risk more war, prevented British
settlers from crossing the Appalachians, so it was mostly home to native people at that point. As
part of the treaty ending the Revolutionary War, much of the British colony of Quebec was
made a part of the newly independent United States. Mostly wilderness, home to a large
native population and a few French towns, all the new American lands once part of Quebec
were, though for a few years claimed by Virginia, made into a massive territory, called the
Northwest Territory. Though some were allies of the new country, many of the native people
of the territory were opposed to US control, especially as American settlers pushed west
across the Appalachians and began settling in the Northwest Territory. The United States and native
tribes often waged brutal war against one another for control of the Northwest Territory. The
settlement of the territory by American settlers saw many native people killed or pushed west. The
territory was seen as one of the country’s first frontiers. Settlers and pioneers crossed over
the mountains to establish towns and farms and try their luck in what was then the country’s
western wilderness. As its population grew, the federal government began breaking it up into
smaller territories and admitting them as states. The first division of the Northwest territory
came in 1800. It was split in a line extending from the tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula down
to the Ohio River. The area to the east of it remained the Northwest Territory. The land to the
west of that line all the way to the Mississippi River became a new territory, given the name of an
old land company that had made claims on the other side of the Ohio River - the Indiana Territory.
Just three years later, the southern half of the Northwest Territory became the state of Ohio, and
its borders with the Indiana Territory were ironed out to what they are today, and the rest of the
Lower Peninsula was given to the territory. Two years after that, the peninsula was broken off of
Indiana and became the Michigan Territory. Another four years after that, in 1809, Indiana was shrunk
down to its current borders. Everything to its northwest became the new Illinois Territory. In
1811 to 1813, the territory was the site of the last major resistance in the region by native
people against American expansion. The governor of the Indiana Territory - William Henry Harrison,
wanted the native people of the territory to cede more land to the government so they could open it
up to settlers and increase its population so that the territory could gain statehood. He negotiated
with the leaders of a few tribes and drew up the Treaty of Fort Wayne, which gave a huge swath of
land that had been under the control of a number of native tribes to the territorial government.
However, many native people living there were very unhappy with this result. Tribes like the Shawnee
had been left out of negotiations completely, which saw more US settlers pouring into their
land as a result. Shawnee leader Tecumseh was infuriated, and led an army of many different
native peoples in what was called Tecumseh’s War. Tecumseh’s Confederacy lost the decisive Battle
of Tippecanoe to Harrison’s army near what is now Lafayette. It marked the beginning of the end
for Native American sovereignty in the Indiana Territory and saw William Henry Harrison rise to
fame that would eventually result in his election to the presidency. It also saw the territory’s
population increase dramatically as new settlers poured into the region, mostly Germans from
Pennsylvania, and Irish and English from New England and New York. In that decade alone,
Indiana’s population went from 24,000 to 147,000, and on December 11th, 1816, it was admitted
to the Union as the 19th state, Indiana. The new state’s population would skyrocket upwards in
the following decades. For settlers crossing the Appalachians, Indiana was a promising destination.
The Ohio River was one of the main routes west, and boats often stopped in Indiana, bringing
in new settlers. The Falls of the Ohio, located between Indiana and Kentucky, meant that
ships traveling west would have to stop, dock, move their goods, and disembark their passengers
there if they wanted to move further downstream. This strategic location turned the area into an
early major port, and cities developed on both sides of the river - Louisville in Kentucky and
on the Indiana side, many of the state’s earliest cities, such as Clarksville, Jeffersonville and
New Albany. Corydon, Indiana’s first capital city, wasn’t far from the falls. Boats weren’t the only
way to go west. A few decades after statehood, the country’s first major road west, the
National Road, came to Indiana. Settlers could travel by road or by ship up the Potomac River to
Cumberland, Maryland. From there, the road took them across the Appalachians through Pennsylvania,
West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and later Illinois. The road brought people to the center of the
state, through the towns of Richmond, Terre Haute, and the new capital city, a planned town in nearly
the very center of the state, called Indianapolis. On top of that, settlers traveled north across
the Ohio from neighboring Kentucky and the South. Many were Scots-Irish, descendants of people from
Northern Ireland whose ancestors had moved there from Northern England and Southern Scotland as
part of the British colonization of Ireland. The flat, fertile state soon became filled with
farms and small towns. In its first decade of statehood, Indiana was home to just 147,000
people. Just four decades later, in 1860, its population had increased tenfold to 1.35
million, making it the fifth most populous state in the entire country, surpassed only
by New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois. Huge waves of German immigration helped
its population grow. German immigrants moved across the state, many of them farmers who
sought out Indiana’s agricultural land. Today, their descendants make up the largest ancestry
group in the state, at 21%. During the Civil War, Indiana remained loyal to the Union. Though
most of the war was fought in the South, Indiana was right across from the border state
of Kentucky, and one battle was fought within the state, in Corydon in Southern Indiana, and the
Confederacy captured the town of Newburgh, on the Ohio River near Evansville, for a few days, the
first northern town captured by the Confederates during the war. The state contributed hundreds
of thousands of soldiers to the Union cause. Key in Indiana’s rapid success post-war was not
just its strategic location for settlers and fertile farmland, but its role as an industrial
and manufacturing powerhouse. Railroads, like the Baltimore and Ohio, or B&O Railroad,
connected it to the cities of the east coast, and Northern Indiana especially would turn the
state into a manufacturing giant through its role in the steel industry. The state’s location
ensured it would rise as a major steel producer. Steel production essentially requires two main
ingredients - iron and coal. Coal can be found in a number of different states, but some of the
largest producers - Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky, are all in the Appalachians.
Indiana and Illinois both have large coal deposits as well. Deposits of iron ore, however, are
mostly concentrated around Lake Superior, in Minnesota’s Iron Range, and the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan. Iron got shipped by boat out of cities like Duluth, Minnesota across Lake Superior
and to the rest of the Great Lakes. Meanwhile, coal would be transported from the Appalachians to
the Lakes, where it could meet the ships carrying iron and be smelted into steel, and the steel
shipped by boat or by rail from there to the rest of the country and the world. Because of this,
America’s most prominent manufacturing cities all developed around the Great Lakes. Elbert Henry
Gary founded US Steel in 1901, and a few years later began building a massive complex of steel
mills at the southern end of Lake Michigan, where the ships carrying iron could meet the transports
of coal from Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky. Gary’s steel manufacturing plants needed a place
for workers to live, and he built a company town that he named Gary after himself. The city grew to
nearly 200,000 residents, the second most populous in the state after just Indianapolis. John D.
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil built a massive oil refinery in nearby Whiting, just across the
border from Chicago. The Whiting Refinery was at the time the largest oil refinery in the
entire country, and 20% of all oil production in the US came through Whiting. It helped
that all these industrial cities in Northern Indiana were located near the rising megacity of
Chicago. They were able to take advantage of the city’s status as a rail and transportation hub, as
well as a destination for immigrants and migrants seeking industrial jobs. Chicago grew because the
Chicago River, which flowed into Lake Michigan, and from it the St. Lawrence River and the
Atlantic, has its headwaters very close to the Des Plaines River, which flows into the Illinois
River and through it to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the closest the watershed
of the Great Lakes gets to the watershed of the Mississippi, and so it became the site of a
portage, where people would get out of boats and move their cargo a short distance to the other
river. Eventually, canals connected the two, further ensuring the city’s strategic success.
One of those canals connected the Des Plaines to the Calumet River, a Lake Michigan tributary
whose mouth is less than two thousand feet from the Indiana border, and another canal, called
the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, connected the Calumet to Lake Michigan in the Indiana
city of East Chicago, and in doing so connected Indiana to the systems of trade and transportation
that linked the Mississippi to the Great Lakes and made Chicago what it is today. Further east,
another Lake Michigan port, Burns Harbor, was linked to the canal system as well. Connected
to it, as well as growing rail and highway lines, Burns Harbor and East Chicago developed enormous
steel mills and joined Gary as some of the largest steel producers in the country, all
concentrated in one little corner of Indiana. Immigrants and migrants poured into Gary and other
lakeside cities near Chicago to work industrial jobs in Indiana’s factories, mills, refineries,
and ports. These industrial cities of Northern Indiana generally followed the same migration
trends as neighboring Chicago. Immigrants from Poland and Ireland flocked to Northern Indiana,
and were in part responsible for its massive growth as a population center, contributing
to the culture and history of the region. Sitting just north of the traditional north-south
border and a major center of industry, Indiana became a destination for Black American migrants
from the South as well. Black Southerners, fleeing segregation, racist Jim Crow laws, and an
exploitative system of labor called sharecropping, made the journey north as jobs opened up in
manufacturing and industry during the World Wars, in what was known as the Great Migration.
Many of the migrants to Indiana came from states sitting directly to the south of it, like
Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. Indianapolis as well as cities near Chicago
like Gary were major destinations for Great Migration migrants, and saw Indiana gain a pretty
substantial Black population. At the same time, the KKK, a racist, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic,
and anti-immigrant hate group rose to prominence in Indiana in the 1920s. The Indiana branch of
the Klan was particularly powerful. During the first half of the 20th century, Indiana had more
Klan members than any other state, and in most counties, 30, even 40% of men in Indiana were
members of the KKK. They operated during that time as a powerful political machine, endorsing
candidates who pushed their hateful agenda. At their peak, they were responsible for the election
of Governor Edward Jackson, rumored to have been a member of the Klan himself and basically
controlled by the hate group. Their reign in the state lasted for decades, and was a very
dark moment in Indiana’s history. Indianapolis, which had already seen success due to its status
as capital city and its location on the National Road, continued to be an important transportation
center. It had a centralized location between both population centers and natural resources, and as
such became a major railroad hub. More industry followed. Surrounded by agriculture and filled
with railroads, it became a huge pork packing center. In 1876, an Indianapolis pharmacist
named Eli Lilly founded a pharmaceutical company he named after himself. It would grow
to become an enormous pharmaceutical supplier and is today the largest company in the state.
Studebaker, once a huge automobile manufacturer, was founded in South Bend, and was responsible for
much of the city’s growth, making Indiana a major automobile manufacturer. Indiana is also known as
a huge producer of limestone. Southern Indiana, near the town of Bedford, is filled with
limestone quarries, and the limestone that built iconic structures like the Empire State
Building, the Pentagon, the Biltmore, many of the buildings in Chicago, as well as many of the
monuments and buildings in Washington DC, like the National Cathedral, the Treasury building, and
the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, are made at least in part, out of Indiana limestone. Most of
Indiana University, in Bloomington, is built out of limestone from nearby quarries, and it gives
it a really beautiful campus. Indiana, northern Indiana especially, saw major challenges with the
decline of the Rust Belt. Studebaker was bought out, later went bankrupt and stopped producing
vehicles, hurting South Bend, which was in many ways a company town. Gary was one of the hardest
hit cities in the entire Rust Belt. Once Indiana’s second largest city, it’s lost 61% of its
population since its peak, as the American steel industry has been in decline and companies have
moved jobs overseas. Gary was always dependent on the steel industry, and huge layoffs and closures
have been devastating. It saw huge white flight, as white people left the city while black people,
often refused credit, insurance, loans, mortgages, and other services that had helped many poor
white people rise into the middle class, often had nowhere else to go. These practices plunged black
neighborhoods like those in Gary into poverty, and while white people fled elsewhere, many
black people, due to the economic consequences of redlining often could not afford to move to
the suburbs or were simply refused when trying to buy homes there. As the once diverse city’s
economy declined, it became more and more de facto segregated. At the height of the Great Migration,
Gary was 18% black, today it’s 80% - not because more black people moved there, but because most
white people left. Having lost more than half its population, one of the highest rates of
population decline in the country, it’s often described as one of America’s few “ghost cities.”
This isn’t entirely fair, as plenty of people do still live there, but it was built for a much
larger population than it has today, and so many of its downtown buildings are completely empty.
If you visit it, you’ll see boarded up windows, and buildings and houses that are empty, burned
out or windows smashed in, roofs caving in. It’s one of the few places in the country where you’ll
see large downtown buildings that are completely abandoned. Many of them have been torn down,
and the city’s filled with vacant overgrown lots where they used to be, whole blocks of the city
are just empty. Today, 13,000 buildings in Gary are abandoned, and people will actually visit
to explore these old industrial relics. It's a place that’s eerily beautiful in its own way, but
it’s also somewhere a lot of people call home, nearly a third of whom live in poverty, one
of the highest rates in the entire country. The rest of the region around Lake Michigan has
been becoming more and more suburbanized. Gary and other cities nearby were always in Chicago’s
orbit, but were more independent. As they declined, and the suburbs of Chicago have sprawled
further into the state, towns and rural areas that used to be more independent have become pretty
suburban, and a lot of your typical upper and middle class suburbia has taken over a lot of the
Region, whereas the area on the lakeshore itself remains very industrialized, though less busy.
Even though Gary itself was hit particularly hard, Indiana’s been more successful than other Rust
Belt states in recent decades. Other cities like Indianapolis and Fort Wayne have done
well, with much more diversified economies. Even the steel industry didn’t see as much decline
as in other steel giants like Pennsylvania, and Indiana’s the country’s largest steel
producer today. Indianapolis, especially, has seen rapid growth, especially in its
suburbs, which have become quite wealthy. It’s the largest city in the state by far, home
to 1.7 million people in it and its suburbs, which makes it the 32nd most populous urban area in the
country, and it’s also the capital city of the state. It sits on the White River, a non-navigable
tributary of the Wabash. It sits nearly exactly in the geographic center of the state, the land
it sits on was specifically selected to build Indiana’s capital city in a place where it would
be accessible to Hoosiers from all corners of the state, and its streets are laid out in a grid
around a circle in the very center of downtown, which surrounds the massive and beautiful Soldiers
and Sailors Monument. Because it’s a planned city, it’s filled with parks and canals with trails and
riverwalks alongside them, as well as memorials. Indianapolis has more war memorials than any other
city in the country other than Washington DC. There’s also a memorial to Robert Kennedy’s famous
speech in the city after Martin Luther King’s assassination. It’s home to brick roads downtown,
historic older buildings and newer skyscrapers, like the Salesforce Tower, which is the tallest
building in the state. Most of Indiana’s tallest buildings are in Indianapolis, and it’s home to
a large string of parks and malls that stretches downtown, lined by museums, memorials, churches,
and government buildings. Its capitol building sits right downtown, and is a beautiful building
made of Indiana limestone. There’s a lot to do in Indianapolis, or Indy, as it’s often called. It’s
filled with museums, like the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the largest children’s museum on
earth, and is home to restaurants like the famous St. Elmo Steakhouse. Indianapolis, however, is
most famous for the Indy 500. The 500 mile motor race is one of, if not the, most prestigious
automobile races in the world. The largest sporting event in the world that takes place
in one day, it’s held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, or the Brickyard, a huge racetrack that
has the largest capacity of any sporting venue in the world, able to fit as many as 400,000
people. It’s home to unique neighborhoods like Broad Ripple Village and the Wholesale District,
as well as large, sprawling suburbs like Carmel and Fishers. On top of that, the beautiful
hills and forests of Brown County are only an hour's drive south, so nature isn’t far away.
Fort Wayne is a much smaller city, home to 336,000 people in it and its suburbs, the second
largest urban area centered in the state, though it’s smaller than the Chicago suburbs
in Indiana. Formerly the site of Kekionga, the capital city of the Miami native people, and
later a series of colonial and American forts, the small city sits where the St. Marys and St.
Joseph River flow together to form the Maumee River, a strategic location that helped the
city’s success. The northern Indiana city was a huge manufacturing center, and was where the
video game console, the gas pump, and the fridge were all invented. Today, it’s a really nice small
city and the urban anchor of northeastern Indiana. Today, 78.5% of Hoosiers are white, 9.3% are
black, 7.1% are Latino, and 2.4% are Asian American. The state is home to a large German
American and Irish American population - 21.4% of Hoosiers have German ancestry, making it the
largest ancestry group in the state, and 11.4% have Irish ancestry. It’s also home to the third
largest Amish population in the entire country, after nearby Pennsylvania and Ohio, and in fact,
it has the largest proportion of residents in the country that are Amish, nearly one percent of
the population. Many Amish lead a traditional lifestyle, not using cars and a lot of technology,
and live in farming communities, raising barns and riding horses and buggies. They live in rural
areas in both northern and southern Indiana. In large part because of the state’s Amish
community, German is the third most spoken language in the state, when it’s only the tenth
most spoken in the country overall. Religiously, Christianity dominates in Indiana.
72% of Hoosiers are Christian, and other individual religious groups at most only
make up 1% of the population. Most are Protestant, 52% of the state’s population, and most of them,
nearly a third of all Hoosiers, are Evangelicals. The two most iconic Indiana foods are the pork
tenderloin sandwich, a sandwich made with a thin piece of pork that’s deep fried and served on a
bun, and the sugar cream pie, a custard pie with cinnamon sugar on top. The largest newspaper in
the state is the Indianapolis Star, or IndyStar, in Indianapolis. It’s home to a number of renowned
colleges and universities. There’s Purdue in West Lafayette, the flagship campus of Indiana
University in Bloomington, Indiana State in Terre Haute, and Notre Dame, a famous Catholic
university outside of South Bend. A number of popular TV shows, like Parks and Recreation and
Stranger Things, are set in fictional Indiana towns, though neither are filmed there. Indiana
is home to two major league sports teams, both in Indianapolis. There’s the NFL’s Indianapolis
Colts, who play at the Lucas Oil Stadium, and the NBA’s Indiana Pacers, who play at the
Gainbridge Fieldhouse. The Chicago suburbs though, tend to root for Chicago rather than Indianapolis
teams. Its busiest airport is the Indianapolis International Airport. Its largest corporations
include health company Elevance in Indianapolis, Indianapolis pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly,
Cummins in Columbus, and Steel Dynamics in Fort Wayne. Probably the most famous Hoosier is Michael
Jackson. Him and the rest of the Jackson family are from Gary. Other famous Hoosiers include David
Letterman, James Dean, Dean Norris, Steve McQueen, Jenna Fischer, Larry Bird, Kurt Vonnegut, John
Green, and though he’s most associated with Kentucky, Colonel Harlan Sanders. No presidents
were born in Indiana, but one, Benjamin Harrison, based his political career out of the state. He
was born not far across the border in Ohio near Cincinnati, and moved to Indianapolis as a young
adult, became a lawyer, and was eventually elected Senator from the state before being elected to the
Presidency. Additionally, Harrison’s grandfather, William Henry Harrison, had been Indiana’s
territorial governor and previously had served as the congressional delegate from its predecessor,
the Northwest Territory. Afterwards though, he continued his political career out
of Ohio before winning the presidency. Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and built
his political career out of Illinois but he grew up and spent most of his childhood in a cabin
in the forests of southern Indiana. There have also been two recent vice presidents from Indiana.
George H.W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, was a congressman and then Senator from Indiana before
serving as Vice President, and Donald Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, was a congressman and then
Governor. Pete Buttigieg, the current Secretary of Transportation, was the mayor of South Bend
who rose to popularity during a surprisingly successful presidential campaign. Current Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts is from outside of Michigan City. Politically, Indiana
is a reliably red state. It has a Cook Partisan Voting Index, or PVI, of R+11, meaning in a given
presidential election, Republicans do about 11% better in Indiana than in the country on average.
Though it’s been very red in recent elections, Indiana actually narrowly voted for Barack Obama
in the 2008 election. Out of Indiana’s 9 members of the House of Representatives, 2 are Democrats
and 7 are Republicans. Both of their Senators, Mike Braun and Todd Young, are Republicans,
as is their governor, Eric Holcomb. That is it for Indiana. I want to give a big thank
you to everyone who has already joined my Patreon. Through it you can access different things such as
behind the scenes videos, early access to maps I create, an exclusive Discord Q&A with me, ad-free
content and shoutouts in my videos, such as these. Please be sure to check out the TII Store, where
you’ll be able to purchase all sorts of official That Is Interesting products and merchandise,
including shirts, hoodies, embroidered beanies, masks, mugs, embroidered backpacks, laptop
stickers and sleeves, and so on. Also, please subscribe to my brother’s channel, Quinn
the Cameraman. He made the great intro at the beginning of this video that I’ll use in all
the US Explained videos, so go show him some support! I tried to be pretty thorough with this
video, but I know there were definitely things I missed as there was a lot to talk about. I want to
give a big thank you to everyone from Indiana who helped give me information for this video, leaving
detailed and informative comments on YouTube as well as Discord. I truly would not have been able
to make this video without all your help. My next video in this series will be on Mississippi.
I’ve never been there, so I’ll need all the help I can get. If you’re from Mississippi, please
respond to my community post or my comment here, or leave something in the Discord server to
let me know what you’d like to see included about your home state. I really appreciate the
well over 600 of you who have already joined my Discord server. If you haven’t joined the
Discord server yet, it's a great place to continue conversations about the topics discussed
in these videos, interact with fellow viewers, and help provide information about upcoming
states in this series. It’s a great community, and we do fun stuff like geography game nights,
live podcasts, and so on. I’ll put links to both the Patreon and the Discord in the description.
thank you for watching this video and I hope you learned something new subscribe for more
content like this I cover the countries cities people and places of the world and Beyond these
videos will leave you saying that is interesting
