Aliff Henley’s gravestone in the Rush Cemetery, courtesy Howard County Historical Society.
A version of this post was published in the Indiana Historical Society’s Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 34, no. 4 (Fall 2022).
On the first Monday in November 1801, a landowner named Edward Fentriss entered the courthouse in Randolph County, North Carolina, with a petition of manumission.[1] Edward represented his brother George, who owned two people—Aliff Henley, originally from Virginia, who had been enslaved by the Fentriss family since at least 1779, and her child, Case.[2] When the petition was approved by the “worshipfull County Court of Randolph,” Henley and her son were free from the shackles of slavery.[3]
Henley’s story as a newly-free person of color, was destined to reach well beyond its Upper South origins. Indeed, her life now touches hearts and minds in an area far removed from North Carolina. Because on another November morning, forty-three years and 500 miles from bondage, Henley was first in line at the state land office in Delphi, Indiana. There, she paid $280 cash money “in full” for 80 acres in Section 12 of Township 24 North, Range 2 East.[4] On November 11, 1844, with someone helping her enter her name in the Miami Reserve tract book for Canal Lands, Aliff Henley, a woman from North Carolina who endured slavery and could not read or write, became the first known Black American to buy land in Howard County, Indiana.[5] Based on enslavement records and census schedules, it is likely she was born around 1760 in Virginia, making her about 80 when she bought her land.
Tracing Henley’s remarkable journey shows she was still in Randolph County, North Carolina in the 1830 census. But this was a period of migration and by mid-decade she had reached Indiana. Her daughter, Lucinda, married David Rush, another North Carolina native, on June 29, 1837, in Rush County.[6] They continued west and by 1840 were living on Indianapolis’s west side.
In the 1830s and ’40s, Indiana was selling land taken from Native American tribes by treaty to help subsidize the Wabash and Erie Canal. Statewide newspapers published details about available land tracts in the Great Miami Reserve as part of these Canal Land sales.[7] Sometime in 1844 the Rush and Henley families gathered their belongings and headed north to the Miami Reserve.
Part of Indiana State Patent for Aliff Henley, dated February 11, 1845.
Their arrival resulted in the first of two Black settlements in northwestern Howard County (originally Richardville County, but renamed Howard in 1846). The Bassett and Rush settlements lasted from approximately 1845 to around 1920.[8] The former, centrally located in Ervin Township, is better known. But the earlier and first settlement developed about four miles to the east of Bassett, right on the boundary line (600 County Road West) between Ervin and Clay Townships. Kokomo, the county seat, lay some six miles to the southeast. A brief published history notes the settlement was named for Reverend Rush, described as a “devout and spiritual man, well-versed in the Bible, though entirely unable to read or write.”[9]
According to archival records, Rush settlement originated by at least 1845.[10] Reverend Rush was farming here by then because his name appeared as a squatter with about fifty acres in the U.S. government’s 1846 public land survey.[11] Furthermore, as the small settlement grew, he was one of three named individuals on an 1851 deed entrusted to ensure three-quarters of an acre of land in Ervin Township would be used to “Erect or cause to be Built thereon a house or place of Worship,” which would be the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Howard County.[12] The grantor of land was his mother-in-law, adding the AME church to Aliff Henley’s legacy.
Compiled by author.
Following her 1861 death, Henley deeded her farm to her son, Case, and daughter, Lucinda, (Reverend Rush’s wife).[13] The farm and the rest of the eighty acres were eventually sold. The frame building, where families worshipped and schoolchildren studied, is long gone. Only headstones, including hers, in the graveyard remain—symbolizing stories long waiting to be told.
Henley was a woman who survived enslavement and traveled hundreds of miles in perilous times for Black individuals, purchasing 80 acres of land, in full, on November 11, 1844. She shared her land to build a community and to start a church. Henley was born before a revolution and died the year the Civil War started. Her life is a tribute to the enduring human spirit and perseverance spanning an epoch of American history. Henley is a matriarch of Indiana and Howard County. What better symbol to her memory than the decoration on her tombstone—a rose in full bloom.
Further Reading
Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers & The Struggle for Equality (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).
Gilbert Porter, “Howard County’s African American Pioneers,” Kokomo Perspective, February 10, 2021, B3, Kokomo-Howard County Public Library, accessed Howard County Indiana Memory Project.
Stephen Vincent, Southern Seed. Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Notes:
[1] Record of Slaves and Free Persons, N.C. Archives. File Number: C.R. 081.928. 1 through 6 (#) in The Genealogical Journal 12, no. 38 (The Randolph County Genealogical Society Of The Randolph County Historical Society, Spring 1988): 38.
[2] Edna Hawkins-Hendricks, Black History: Our Heritage Princess Anne County, Virginia Beech, Virginia (self-published, 1998), p. 24, accessed Archive.org.
[4] Aliff Hendley [sic], Certificate #1416, Nov. 11, 1844. Wabash Canal Lands, Register of the Sale of. Oct. 1, 1842 to June 30, 1847. No. 26. Winamac District, Tract Book, Miami Reserve.
[5] Canal Land Patents, Accession #1957006, State Land Office Collection, Indiana State Archives.
[6] Indiana Marriages, 1811-2007, David Rush and Lucinda Henley, 29 Jun 1837; citing Rush, Indiana, United States, Marriage Registration, Indiana Commission on Public Records.
[7] “Sale of Canal Lands,” Logansport Telegraph, September 14, 1844, 2; Indiana State Journal, September 28, 1844, 4.
[8] Early Black Settlements by County, Indiana Historical Society, accessed indianahistory.org.
[9] Rush or Upper Colored Settlement Cemetery Record, Logansport, Indiana. August 18, 1947, L’Anguille Valley Historical & Memorial Association.
[10] “Rush,” Kokomo Gazette Tribune, August 17, 1886, 1.
[11] Field Notes for the Public Land Survey Township Plats, 1789-1946. Record Group 49: Records of the Bureau of Land Management, 1685-2006, accessed Howard County Indiana Memory Project.
[12] Hendley [sic] to Rush & other trustees, Jan. 14, 1851. Deed Book C. Howard County, Indiana. May 1846-Jan. 1856. Pages 374-376.
[13] Aliff Henley’s Will, Sept. 2, 1861. Indiana Wills and Probate Records, 1798-1999. Howard – Will Records. Vols. A and 2.1845-1862. Pages 165-168.
[14] Combination Atlas Map of Howard County, Indiana: Compiled, Drawn and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys, 1877 (Knightstown, IN: Bookmark, 1976), p. 24-25, Historic Indiana Atlases, accessed Indianapolis Public Library.
Pamphlet, “Miss Virginia Brooks: 20th Century Joan of Arc,” 1913, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Iowa City, accessed Wikipedia.
“West Hammond has been electrified of late by what a woman—a woman of intelligence, of action and indomitable courage—can accomplish.”
-Munster Times, 1911
The woman described by the Times was one Virginia Brooks, also dubbed “Joan of Arc” of the burgeoning village of West Hammond. She was determined to end the mistreatment of vulnerable residents and expel corrupt politicians from West Hammond (now Calumet City)—an Illinois town that overlapped into Indiana. Brooks did this by delivering speeches in barrooms, confronting law enforcement officials, and founding her own publication. After realizing the limitations of protests and the press, Brooks embraced the Women’s Suffrage Movement as means of change, leading the charge alongside suffragists like Ida B. Wells.
Brooks was in her early 20s and studying music in Chicago when she received a notification that drew her to West Hammond. According to the Indianapolis News, upon her father’s death, she and her mother, Flora, inherited property in the village. Alerted to $20,000 worth of special assessments against it, they made a trip to the area to investigate. Virginia was stunned by the dilapidated condition of the village and prevalence of casinos and barrooms. Thus, began her reform work.
In early 1911, West Hammond was on the precipice of becoming a city, pending a special municipal election. However, Brooks, with the help of her mother, mounted a campaign to maintain its status as a village. Should the area become a city, vice would essentially be institutionalized and corruption amplified. Preventing this would be quite the feat, as the Times wrote, “The political machine was dead against” the women and their allies.
Brooks gathered locals at Mika’s Hall to discuss the upcoming election. She and organizer August Kamradt spoke to the primarily Polish audience about how city leaders used taxpayers’ money for their own gain, leaving sewers and sidewalks crumbling. Brooks’s sentiments were extremely well-received, and she persuaded attendees to sign a petition asking the State Attorney of Cook County to investigate public officials’ use of tax money.
West Hammond’s 4,000 residents, many of whom were European immigrants, seemingly had little choice but to pay constantly-increasing rent and “special assessments,” which impoverished them further. Despite this, the Huntington Herald noted that male villagers were fairly apathetic until “this young girl. . . . Virginia Brooks has set in motion the levers that work mighty changes.” As the election approached, she spoke at barrooms late into the night, promising that if local efforts failed, she would “appeal to the president and the White House. And if that, too, is useless, she will take the law in her own hands.”
Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1911, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
Brooks’s radical strategies elicited death threats. She laughed these off, although she did appreciate the young men who “formed a bodyguard” around her. On election day, she appealed to voters until the moment they stepped into the voting booth, which was monitored by two deputies Brooks had summoned to prevent fraud.
Despite the valiant fight, Brooks’s faction lost the election, and voters opted for city government by a vote of 227-196. In a scene seemingly plucked from a movie, just as victors celebrated into the night with a bonfire and parade, detectives from the State’s Attorney’s office infiltrated West Hammond. Brooks’s petition had born fruit. The Chicago Tribune reported that the detectives served subpoenas to “keepers of alleged disorderly houses and places where slot machines were found.” Opponents retaliated with more death threats and libel suits. Brooks was far from alone in her convictions, however. One “Taxpayer of West Hammond” wrote to the Hammond Times that “If ‘Virginia is crazy,’ the rest of us should ‘get the bug’ and help to clean things up.”
Following the election, Brooks leveraged another tool in her fight—the media. She established a semi-weekly publication called the Searchlight. Brooks told the Chicago Tribune that she would only publish articles that were backed by evidence, with the goal to “fight the grafters primarily and promote the interests of the working people who make up the bulk of the population.”
The Inter Ocean (Chicago), April 6, 1911, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
In addition to leveraging the press, Brooks engaged in physical confrontation as a means to effect change. In March of 1911, she and her “broom brigade,” composed of about twenty women, halted a paving project at One Hundred and Fifty-Fifth Street. With municipal contract in hand, Brooks and her squadron—equipped with mops, rolling pins, and brooms—sat on piles of bricks, refusing to move for hours. They sat in protest of the city’s decision to hire laborers to install “graft bought” bricks of poor quality five inches too low. Not only that, but the city charged tax payers an exorbitant amount to do so. When workers’ attempts to appeal to the women failed, they summoned the police. Local newspapers reported, perhaps somewhat sensationally, that a fight for the ages ensued. The Indianapolis News relayed:
When the women refused to leave, the police tried to drive them off with clubs, and a hand-to-hand conflict followed. Several of the women were put out of the battle with slight injuries and their male supporters, who came to their aid when the police attacked, were badly beaten.
After combat and bloodshed, the police left and returned with arrest warrants. Virginia Brooks gladly went to jail, hoping her arrest would engender more support for the cause. She was correct, as the Hammond Times reported that the following day, “broad shouldered, firm mouthed women” returned to the work site and resumed the stand-in.
The intensity of the fight carried over to Brooks’s April 3rd trial, for which she was charged with disturbing the peace. According to the Times, the courtroom floors and walls were lined with observers, many of whom were women who “shoved and crowded among the men” to take in every word. Officer John Okraj testified that Brooks had struck him in the face after being placed under arrest. The Times reported that Brooks, “an excellent witness in her own behalf,” testified that Officer Okraj likely didn’t know his own strength, and that he hurt her when he forcefully grabbed her neck. Her response was “but a primitive action, an instinctive motion, which anyone would make when attacked from the rear.”
Ultimately, the jury found Brooks guilty, but she was fined only $1. Just as jurors convicted her, she received word that State Attorney Wayman pledged to investigate graft charges in the village. This investigation likely spurred the indictment of City Clerk Martin Finneran in May. He was charged with collecting and depositing taxes from the Michigan Central Railroad into his personal account one week after he was dismissed from the office of West Hammond village collector. And, just a few months after Brooks’s trial, her battle against exploitation and “exorbitant special assessments” paid off. The Hammond Times reported that a county circuit court judge ruled in her favor regarding the work at One Hundred and Fifty-Fifth, resulting in a 30% reduction “of the original cost and an extra assessment of about $5,000.”
Pamphlet, “Miss Virginia Brooks: 20th Century Joan of Arc,” 1913, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Iowa City, accessed Wikipedia.
Overjoyed taxpayers organized a band concert in celebration. Her widely-publicized achievements attracted love interests and generated about fifty marriage proposals, according to the Chicago Tribune. She responded “‘I wouldn’t marry the best man alive'” because “politics comes before love with me.”
Instead, Brooks focused on ousting the old village leadership to ensure that the newly-dubbed city would be managed by reputable councilors. According to the Evansville Press, in August 1911, she threatened the village council president that if he refused to convene a municipal election she would “expose the whole outfit.” The paper reported tellingly that immediately after her threat, the “president announced that he was sick and would have to go to the hospital for a couple of months.”
While awaiting word of a municipal election, Brooks led the charge in another election. She convened a mass meeting at Mika’s to persuade residents to vote against a new proposal by the village board. It would tax residents to build a private power line, which would solely benefit the Interstate Electrical Company. Despite being issued “mutilated ballots,” indignant voters managed to defeat the board’s proposal. The Indianapolis News noted that Brooks hired carriages to take voters to the polls, resulting in the “biggest vote ever known in the city’s history.” In fact, local papers suggested that such a resounding defeat could result in her nomination for mayor of West Hammond.
The Times (Munster, IN), April 2, 1912, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
Realizing that this could never be achieved without the female vote, Brooks embraced the women’s suffrage movement, which she had previously dismissed as unnecessary. Mass meetings and protests could only go so far without women’s voting rights. In the spring of 1912, she infiltrated Chicago restaurants to lay out the urgent need for enfranchisement. The Munster Times noted “instead of waiting until her audience came to her she took her speech to the places where sufficient numbers of persons were gathered to make audiences for her.” Her speeches were met with resounding applause from diners.
Immediately after this brief crusade, organizers asked Brooks to speak at the Indiana’s Women’s Franchise League annual convention in Indianapolis. Of the prominent Hoosier suffrage leaders, like Dr. Amelia Keller and Grace Julian Clarke, the Indianapolis News reported that Brooks “easily attracted the most attention at the convention.” She described for her fellow suffragists how she had mobilized for reform, gripping them with the story of hand-to-hand combat in West Hammond. However, she had recently embraced a strategy more familiar to audience members—many of whom were upper-middleclass women— lobbying state senators. Brooks told convention-goers, “The women need the ballot, and the country needs women voters . . . We don’t want to mix in the dirty politics of the men, but we do want to work with them to make things better.”
Dr. Hannah Graham, president of Indiana’s other major suffrage organization, the Equal Suffrage Association (ESA), invited Brooks to speak at an ESA meeting, along with union leader Frank Hayes, Indianapolis Mayor Lew Shank, and prominent Black attorney F.B. Ransom. Perhaps this meeting of the minds and exchange of ideas inspired Brooks to pursue law. According to the Indianapolis Star, Brooks told Dr. Graham, “I have property, and in my fights against corrupt politicians a knowledge of law certainly would help me.” Dr. Graham revealed that she was currently studying at the Indiana Law School and suggested the two drive there that very day. Brooks took her up on the suggestion and met with faculty, telling them she wanted to study law to aid the “poor Polish people in West Hammond.” She became the third woman to enroll in the junior class.
Brooks’s experience mobilizing at the local and state level served her well at the famed National American Woman Suffrage Association parade in Washington, D.C. She joined thousands of women from across the country on March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Hoping to draw widespread attention to the need for enfranchisement, the women paraded throughout the nation’s capital, some in costume and others hoisting banners.
Virginia Brooks and Ida B. Wells at the 1913 National American Woman Suffrage Association parade, courtesy of Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1913, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
Brooks and Belle Squires led the Illinois delegation. According to Ron Grossman’s 2020 Chicago Tribune article, organizers ordered Brooks’s friend and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells to march at the back of the parade with the other Black suffragists. Rather than concede, Wells opted to sit out altogether, despite Brooks’s insistence that they march together. At the last minute, Wells ran towards Squires and Brooks, and the three women flanked the head of the delegation. Despite violence perpetrated against some of the marchers, the 1913 parade catalyzed public support for women’s suffrage and reinvigorated the movement.
The parade may have been the zenith of Brooks’s activism. Just one month later—despite her earlier pronouncements about marriage—she wed Chicago Tribune photographer Charles Washburne and the couple relocated to Chicago. Brooks said of West Hammond, “‘The fight is over there, and I guess we have won. We are going to settle down.'” She went on to write for the Tribune, volunteer at the Hull House, and lecture at chautauquas. She drew upon her experiences to author books about social issues like My Battle With Vice and The Little Lost Sister. Around 1918, Virginia relocated to Portland, Oregon with her mother and son, Brooks. After months of illness, she passed away at the age of 42, just a few months before the stock market crash. She likely would have agitated relentlessly for relief like Hoosier reformer Theodore Luesse did during the Great Depression. Despite a life cut short, Brooks demanded accountability and fearlessly effected change in The Region.
Sources:
“The Right Sort of Courage,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 5, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Villagers Swarm to Gathering,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 26, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Virginia Brooks, West Hammond’s Joan of Arc,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 28, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Death Threats Against Girl,” Fort Wayne News, January 31, 1911, 10, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Girl is Defeated in Reform Fight,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1911, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Village is to Become City in May,” The Times (Hammond, IN), February 1, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Sued by City Officials,” News-Democrat (Paducah, KY), February 4, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
Editorial by “A Taxpayer of West Hammond,” “Ought to Clean Up,” The Times (Hammond, IN), February 6, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Brooks Starts as Editor to Rid Her Town of Election Frauds,” Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer, February 13, 1911, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“One Girl’s Sunday Fight to Clean Up ‘The Rottenest Town in the Country,'” Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 5, 1911, 47, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Girl Routs Paving Gang,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1911, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Riot in Village; Girl is Jailed,” The Times (Hammond, IN), March 25, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Girl Leader of Mob Thrown in Jail After Day of Bloodshed,” Inter Ocean (Chicago), March 26, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Comedy Injected in Trial,” The Times (Hammond, IN), April 4, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Brooks is Fined by Jury,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1911, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
United Press, “Village Joan of Arc After the Grafters,” Evansville Press, August 16, 1911, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Brooks Still Active,” South Bend Tribune, May 25, 1911, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Virginia Brooks Wins Another Battle,” The Times (Hammond, IN), July 11, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Brooks vs. Woman Suffrage,” The Times (Hammond, IN), August 14, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“New War Stirs West Hammond,” Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1911, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Mass Meeting Across the Line,” The Times (Hammond, IN), November 1, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Bond Issue in Fought,” The Times (Hammond, IN), November 7, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Books Wins Fight Against Bonds,” Indianapolis News, November 8, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Brooks of Hammond,” Indianapolis Star, November 15, 1911, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Settlement was Nicely Remembered,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 5, 1912, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Virginia Brooks Campaigning,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 10, 1912, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Suffrage ‘Joan of Arc’ Speaking to Restaurant Guests,” The Times (Munster, IN), April 2, 1912, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
“New Constitution Desired by Women,” Indianapolis News, April 4, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
Betty Blythe, “Miss Brooks, Suffrage ‘Joan of Arc,’ Tells How She Rules West Hammond,” Indianapolis Star, April 4, 1912, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Graft is Scored by Miss Brooks in Ballot Plea,” Indianapolis Star, April 4, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Women Ignored by ‘Constitution,'” South Bend Tribune, April 4, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Man Thrown into Ditch,” Indianapolis News, April 23, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Warm Supporter Cause of Suffrage,” Indianapolis News, April 24, 1912, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Brooks Plans to Study Law Here,” Indianapolis Star, April 25, 1912, 10, accessed Newspapers.com.
Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1913, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
Virginia Brooks, My Battles with Vice (Macaulay Co., 1915), accessed Archive.org.
“Mrs. Virginia Washburne, Writer, Lecturer, is Dead,” Oregon Daily Journal, July 15, 1929, 7, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Prominent Woman Dies,” The Oregonian, July 18, 1929, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
Ron Grossman, “Flashback: Fighting for the Vote and Against Vice: Virginia Brooks was the Chicago Area’s Own ‘Joan of Arc,'” Chicago Tribune, August 21, 2020, accessed chicagotribune.com.
Crowd gathered outside of Dong Gong Tshun’s laundry, “Chinese Murder Mystery,” Indianapolis News, May 6, 1902, accessed via Newspapers.com.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism reported that anti-Asian hate crimes increased by approximately 339 percent in 2022. Indiana was no exception. In 2023, the Bloomington community was shocked when a white woman named Billie Davis stabbed an IU student, who has chosen to remain anonymous, on a public bus because she “looked” Chinese. Events like this stunned the nation and forced Americans to reconsider their historical treatment of Chinese immigrants and, more importantly, where they fit into American society today.
This renewed “Chinese question” has warranted a scholarly reexamination of Chinese immigration history. Recent works have examined everything from the lived experiences of the Chinese immigrants who built the Transcontinental Railroad to the vigilante violence white workers in Tacoma, Washington perpetrated against Chinese workers, whom they viewed as economic competition. While great strides have been made in diversifying Chinese immigrant scholarship, historians have left out one small but critical piece of the narrative–Chinese people who lived in the Midwest. In doing so, scholars inadvertently erased the experiences of midwestern Chinese immigrants, ignoring the deep roots they established in the region. Considering renewed interest in both midwestern history and Chinese immigration as a whole, this piece seeks to illuminate the experiences of Chinese immigrants in midwestern communities like Indianapolis.
Chinese Immigration in Indianapolis
The U.S. Census did not record Chinese residents in Indianapolis until 1880, nearly three decades after Chinese immigrants began settling in the U.S. during the California Gold Rush. The Chinese population in Indiana remained small during the late 19th and early 20th centuries with eighty-nine residents in 1890, 273 in 1910, and 279 in 1930. Most Chinese immigrants in Indiana settled in Indianapolis, but others migrated to Ft. Wayne and Richmond. The 1880 Census recorded approximately ten Chinese residents in Indianapolis, all single men.[1] Despite these small numbers, the Chinese community in Indianapolis received outsized newspaper coverage and attention from the mainstream Hoosier community, with many residents regarding their new neighbors with curiosity. An 1880 edition of the Indianapolis News covered the presence of new Chinese laundries in the city, stating that the presence of Chinese laundryman “has created a decided sensation . . . At any hour of the day crowds are seen gathered in front of laundries watching the Chinese work.”[2] This interest in the nascent Chinese community continued throughout the years and, later, entrepreneurial types, such as restaurant owner Moy Kee, would learn how to leverage the community’s fascination with Chinese culture to their economic benefit.
R.L. Polk & Co.’s Indianapolis Directory for 1879 (Indianapolis: R. L. Polk & Co., 1879), p. 540, accessed via Internet Archive.
Historian Keith Schoppa noted that for most Chinese immigrants, Indianapolis was a “secondary” settlement, where Chinese people moved after they initially lived in the more populous Chinatowns on the East and West Coasts.[3] It appears many were motivated to move to Indianapolis for economic reasons, with several Chinese residents starting businesses, namely laundries. In 1875, the Indianapolis City Directory recorded two laundries, Sang Lee & Co. on 41 Virginia Avenue and Wah Lee & Co. on Illinois Street.[4] The number of Chinese laundries increased quickly and by 1879, the city directory noted the presence of eight laundries in the city. Notably, the directory also began designating these laundries as “Chinese,” similar to how directories would note if a business was “Black,” and, in doing so, differentiate them from white businesses. The laundries were spread out around the city, along Illinois Street, Washington Street, Mass Avenue, and Kentucky Avenue, indicating the more dispersed nature of the Indianapolis Chinese population.[5]
One point to note is the business acumen of the Chinese residents. They advertised their services in mainstream newspapers to attract new patronage, often capitalizing on existing curiosity about Chinese immigrants to build interest in their businesses.[6] Newspapers show that laundrymen across Indiana maintained connections with one another, often working in tandem to ensure their safety and security.[7] Inter-state networks between Chinese businessmen was critical to the welfare of dispersed Chinese immigrant communities like Indianapolis, where residents were bereft of the typical community and connections present in traditional Chinatowns. Businessmen also were cognizant of supply and demand, as demonstrated in the Indianapolis News, which reported that, “The Chinese considering the laundry business overdone in this city [Indianapolis], are talking of sending a colony to Fort Wayne.”[8] This demonstrates that the Chinese business community in Indianapolis not only paid attention to economic conditions in the city, but also actively collaborated with one another to avoid unnecessary competition. These strategies proved effective and many residents, such as Moy Kee, E Lung, and Sam Sing, died with sizeable fortunes and extremely successful businesses.
Lithograph of W. Washington Street. The rightmost building advertises “Gun Wa’s Chinese Herb and Vegetable Remedies.” Image circa 1890, Hannah House Collection, accessed Indiana Album.
Overall, it appears that the Chinese community of Indianapolis maintained a nuanced relationship with police and white authority figures. While no mobs or overt hate crimes were committed against the Chinese residents in Indianapolis, they were frequently the target of burglaries at the hands of white assailants. Notably, the victims often reported these incidents to police and worked with authorities to recoup their losses, suggesting a somewhat cooperative relationship between the two groups.[9] However, this cooperative relationship was somewhat tenuous, and white Hoosiers were constantly paranoid about the possibility of Chinese crime or “Tong” activity in Indianapolis. Police frequently placed laundries and restaurants under surveillance due to suspicions of illicit activities. Law enforcement conducted multiple raids on Chinese laundries at night in hopes of finding evidence of gambling and the Chinese betting game Fan-tan.
For example, in January of 1911 approximately twenty Chinese residents appeared in court after being arrested during a police raid while gathering at Quong Lee’s laundry on North Delaware Street. The Indianapolis News covered this event, writing, “Twenty-one unsuspecting Chinese, wearing poker faces, were seated around his [Quong Lee’s] table, yesterday afternoon, when the police appeared … Quong Lee and his ‘guests’ were still deep in their game, among Chinese and American coins and dominoes, when the police suddenly stood among them.” The article noted that the Chinese residents were “respectful” in court and twelve of the men quickly pled guilty and settled their fines with the city.[10] Both the police surveillance and newspaper coverage of possible illicit activity were disproportionate compared to the relative size of the Chinese population. A critical Indianapolis Journal article even categorized the police’s raids a “Chinese Scapegoat,” pointing out that “the police have made no raids recently on the various crap games around the city.”[11]
“The Chinese Scapegoat,” Indianapolis Journal, January 31, 1898, accessed Newspapers.com.
To be sure, Chinese residents likely gambled and played Fan Tan after work. However, little evidence exists to suggest these activities extended beyond local betting or were connected to a vast Chinese criminal network, as some Hoosiers speculated. Unwarranted concern over illicit activity likely was due to the sensationalized news reporting from Chicago, San Francisco, and other states, which often reached Hoosier ears. The white community’s dual fascination with Chinese culture and mistrust of the intentions of their Chinese neighbors created a difficult environment for Chinese businessmen to navigate. Chinese residents capitalized on their heritage to encourage patronage to their shops but struggled to dispel negative stereotypes about Chinese criminal activity or Hoosier concerns about Chinese gambling.
Concerns over criminal activity in the Chinese community peaked in 1902, when a prominent Chinese laundryman, Dong Gon Tshun, colloquially known as Doc Lung, was found murdered at his business on Indiana Avenue. Reporters sensationalized the murder, reporting gory details and speculating on possible criminal activity within the Chinese community. Chin Hee, a Chinese man from Chicago, was quickly arrested for the murder. The murder of Lung pushed Indianapolis into near hysteria, with some residents worrying that the Chinese gang members, often referred to as highbinders, were behind the murder and still active in the city. Doc Lung’s funeral procession was even followed by a curious crowd, which, in other circumstances, could have easily erupted into violence. The murder occurred on Indiana Avenue, where the city’s Black population predominantly lived, and increased tensions between the city’s Chinese community and Black community. Many Chinese residents alleged that a Black assailant, rather than Chin Hee, was responsible for the crime. Chin Hee was ultimately not convicted, and the courts would later convict three Black men for the crime based on dubious evidence.[12]
“Scenes at the Funeral of Doc Lung,” Indianapolis News, May 10, 1902, accessed Newspapers.com.
Ultimately, Doc Lung’s murder case epitomized the tenuous relationship between the Chinese community and white authority figures. Chinese individuals often cooperated with the police and court system, using it to protect their businesses. Police, it appears, were also willing to provide this protection and investigate burglaries or violence against Chinese people in Indianapolis. However, the authorities also regarded the Chinese community with suspicion and paranoia. They speculated that Doc Lung was murdered by highbinders without reasonable evidence and were constantly concerned about Chinese criminal activity permeating into the city. This tension shows that, while Indianapolis residents tolerated Chinese immigrants at a level not seen in coastal states, they never fully accepted them.
Chinese residents also frequently utilized the Marion County court system to settle disputes or advocate for themselves, often successfully. In 1894, a Crawfordsville laundryman named Moy You Bong brought a civil suit against Indianapolis resident Lee Wah over a dispute on the sale of a laundry business in Indianapolis. In response, Lee filed a countersuit denying he defrauded Moy. The court ultimately ruled against Moy, awarding Lee thirty-five dollars.[13] This case of two Chinese residents using the courts to settle a business dispute shows a degree faith in the court system. It also stands in stark contrast to places like California, which actively barred Chinese people from testifying at all.
Conclusion
Launderer and business owner, E. Lung.
Chinese laundrymen, restaurant owners, and store owners of Indianapolis achieved relative economic success. They collaborated with one another to ensure their own safety and, in the early years, began experimenting with tying Chinese culture to their business ventures through advertising Chinese goods. Ultimately, the nascent Chinese community in Indianapolis was small, but closely connected and economically astute. Chinese residents utilized the court system and traditional journalism to advocate for their own needs. However, due to unfounded and sensationalized fears over Chinese criminal activity, many were forced to walk a tight line between embracing their culture for economic gain and distancing themselves from their Chinese identity to remain tolerated members of the Indianapolis community.
Historian Anthony J. Miller characterized Chinese immigrants in the Midwest as “pioneers,” who, far removed from Chinatowns, “not only resisted discrimination but were also the first emissaries of their nation to bring cuisine, customs, dress, language, and artwork from their ancestral homeland to states such as Iowa.”[14] While he wrote primarily about Iowan Chinese residents, this characterization too can be applied to Indianapolis’s Chinese population, which displayed resilience and achieved success in the face of discrimination. In doing so, they brought cultural diversity and resources to the Hoosier community. Today, as Americans revisit the “Chinese question,” it is important that scholars expand beyond the coasts and examine a broader spectrum of the Chinese experience. This reveals a narrative not only of exclusion, violence, and discrimination, but also of success, resilience, and community.
Mian Situ, Chinese Family Laundry, 1880, n.d., oil on canvas, accessed MianSitu.net.
For further reading, see:
Joan Hostetler, “Indianapolis Then and Now: Moy Kee Chinese Restaurant, 506 E. Washington Street,” March 21, 2013, accessed Historic Indianapolis.
Kelsey Green, “Moy Kee Part I: The ‘Mayor’ of Indianapolis’s Chinese Community,” Untold Indiana, Indiana Historical Bureau, June 2, 2022, accessed Untold Indiana Blog.
Kelsey Green, “Moy Kee Part II: A Royal Visit,” Untold Indiana, Indiana Historical Bureau, June 27, 2022, accessed Untold Indiana Blog.
Paul Mullins, “The Landscapes of Chinese Immigration in the Circle City,” October 16, 2016, accessed Invisible Indianapolis.
Scott D. Seligman, “The Hoosier of Mandarin,” Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 23, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 48-55, accessed Digital Images Collection, Indiana Historical Society.
Notes:
[1] Ruth Slevin, “Index to Blacks, Indians, Chinese, Mulattoes in Indiana, 1880 Census,” Genealogy Division, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis.
[2] “Curiosity of Races,” The Indianapolis News, May 21, 1880, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[3] R. Keith Schoppa, “Chinese,” Peopling Indiana: The Ethnic Experience (Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana Historical Press, 1996), p. 88.
[4]Swartz & Tewdrowe’s Annual Indianapolis City Directory (Indianapolis: Sentinel Company Printers, 1874), p. 464, accessed Internet Archive.
[5]R.L. Polk & Co.’s Indianapolis Directory for 1879 (Indianapolis: R. L. Polk & Co., 1879), p. 540, accessed via Internet Archive.
[6] “Wash List,” Indianapolis News, November 12, 1881; “Wah Lee: A Good Hand Laundry,” Indianapolis Star, December 31, 1923, accessed Newspapers.com.
[7] “Sam Sing Lee’s Funeral,” Indianapolis News, October 30, 1900, accessed Newspapers.com.
[8] “The Chinese,” Indianapolis News, October 29, 1877, accessed Newspapers.com.
[9] “A Chinaman Robbed,” Indianapolis Journal, June 15, 1885; “The Chinese Laundry,” Indianapolis News, May 10, 1880, accessed Newspapers.com.
[10] “12 Chinese Promptly Settle Fan Tan Fines,” Indianapolis News. January 16, 1911, accessed Newspapers.com.
[11] “The Chinese Scapegoat,” Indianapolis Journal, January 31, 1898, accessed Newspapers.com.
For newspaper coverage of other raids on Chinese businesses see: “Get 22 in Fan-Tan Raid,” Indianapolis Star, January 16, 1911, accessed Newspapers.com; “Inquiry to Follow Arrest of Chinese,” Indianapolis Star, May 23, 1915, accessed Newspapers.com; “Pong Tells of High Stakes in Chinese Gaming House,” Indianapolis News, September 21, 1915, accessed Newspapers.com; “Police Find Lid at Slight Angle,” Indianapolis Star, July 2, 1917, accessed Newspapers.com.
[12] “A Chinaman Murdered,” The Indianapolis Journal, May 6, 1902, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Chinese in Court on Murder Charge,” Indianapolis News, May 21, 1902, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Threats on Moy Kee Cause of Commotion,” Indianapolis News, June 11, 1902, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Prisoners’ Lips Sealed,” Indianapolis Journal, March 21, 1903, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[13] “A Cry of Police Falsely Raised,” Indianapolis News, December 22, 1894, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[14] Anthony J. Miller, “Pioneers, Sunday Schoolers, and Laundrymen: Chinese Immigrants in Iowa in the Chinese Exclusion Era, 1870-190,” The Annals of Iowa 81, no. 2 (Spring 2022): 118.
On January 11, 1898, a special meeting occurred of the South Side Turnverein, one of Indianapolis’ premier social clubs for German Americans. It was the sixtieth birthday of the organization’s president, Henry Victor. The group heaped “tokens of esteem” on their beloved leader, according to the Indianapolis Journal, which further wrote, “the occasion had the effect of bringing Mr. Victor to tears.” The esteem afforded to Victor was no faint praise; in many respects, he was the main reason the South Side Turnverein met that night, and many others, at all.
Only a few years earlier, previous leadership had barely gotten the organization off the ground. It wasn’t until Henry Victor took over in 1894 that the South Side Turnverein expanded and flourished, providing its members with athletic activities, social functions, and cultural events. Years later in a glowing article, the Journal noted Victor’s work for the organization, calling him the “‘Father’ of the South Side Turnverein” and writing, “to Henry Victor is due the success the club has attained.”
A German immigrant with a passion of business, Victor epitomized the promise that America held for so many newcomers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. His successful management of Mozart Hall, one for Indianapolis’s top bars and restaurants, the growth of the South Side Turnverein, and his involvement in numerous civic organizations spoke to his energy and talent for bringing people together to build vibrant communities. As such, the impact he left on the people he served, both at his businesses and with his leadership, provides us with a compelling example of the German American experience in Indiana.
Victor was born on January 11, 1838, in Pommern, Germany, which today sits between Eastern Poland and Western Germany. He lived in Europe for most of his life, becoming “a successful businessman, dealing in silks and dress goods, [and] was also connected with a private bank and was worth considerable money,” noted the Indianapolis News. He likely immigrated to the United States and moved to Indianapolis sometime between 1887 and 1891, as a relatively older man. What would spur a successful businessman in his native land to come to the U.S.? Like a major reversal of fortune. As the News added, “he was stricken with an affliction of the eyes which threatened him with total blindness. He was taken to a hospital, where he remained for several months, during which time losses occurred in his business, and he left Germany practically a broken man.” Like so many who left for the shores of America during that age, he left to restart, and hopefully improve, his life.
Once in Indianapolis, he got involved in the brewery business, working as a collector for the Terre Haute Brewing Company, which led to his entry into the saloon business. It was in this field that he made his name in the Circle City, with his management of Mozart Hall. In 1892, Victor took over as manager of the decades-old Indianapolis bar and restaurant at 37 South Delaware Street. It didn’t take long for the press to sing his praises. The Indianapolis Journal wrote, “Mr. Victor is one of those whole souled persons who makes friends with everyone he meets, and will not lack in entertaining his customers in that inimitable way he was in conferring with his fellow citizens.” Of Mozart Hall, the article further noted that “none will find a more congenial place in the city to spend a few minutes to pass away the idle moments of the day.”
Upon assuming management of Mozart Hall, Victor placed ads in Indianapolis’s premier German-language newspaper, the Indiana Tribüne, which described for his community what patrons could expect.
The ad read, roughly translated:
Mozart Hall!
Henry Victor.
The biggest, prettiest and oldest beer-style eatery in town. The spacious and beautifully furnished hall is available for clubs, lodges and private individuals to hold balls, concerts and meetings under liberal conditions.
As the ad declared, Mozart Hall not only served individual customers, but became a meeting place for many organizations, such as unions and benevolent associations. In today’s language, Mozart Hall would be called a “maker space,” a congenial, well-furnished building for work, philanthropy, and entertainment.
When he wasn’t hosting civil society, Henry Victor actively participated in it. In 1894, he served as the secretary of the Indiana Liquor Dealer’s Association, which met at Mozart Hall. The association advocated policies they believed would “clean up” the liquor business, including regulations on liquor licenses. As the Indianapolis News reported, “a feeling is growing that only decent people should be granted liquor licenses, and that a protest will be entered against granting liquor licenses to ex-convicts, gamblers, violators of the law, and immoral characters.” Additionally, Victor advocated for policies that would make it easier for breweries to start up and provide its product to local businesses, something that clearly benefitted the German immigrant community he was a part of.
However, his involvement in organizations didn’t always go smoothly. In 1895, he very publicly resigned from the Saloon Keeper’s Union, over disagreements about the implementation of a new liquor law, called the “Nicholson Law,” which placed limitations on gambling, saloons, and underage drinking. Before the national experiment of Prohibition, many state and local laws were implemented in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, as a way to control the ill effects of the liquor trade. However, fierce debates ensued as to how these laws should be followed. In his resignation letter, Victor argued that he was in favor of following these laws and challenging his critics. He wrote:
Many of you members have seen fit to criticize myself and others who have constantly labored for the interest and elevation of the retail trade; and such criticisms have practically gone in public print, and I do not want to be further annoyed this way as in the past, so I will in the future use what influence I possibly have to elevate and regulate the retail business according to my own way.
Former union colleague William G. Weiss, in the Indianapolis Journal, shot back at Victor, arguing that he withdrew because “Mr. Victor is not in sympathy with the union in regard to obeying the law.” Who was right? In the murky territory of pre-Prohibition liquor law, it was often difficult to effectively determine the letter of the law, which led to fierce debates like Victor’s with the Saloon Union. Nevertheless, Victor successfully ran Mozart Hall for many years, earning a reputation as an honest and friendly businessman.
Henry Victor’s notice of his departure from Mozart Hall, Indianapolis News, May 3, 1900. Hoosier State Chronicles.
As his stature in the community grew, so did his involvement in a variety of organizations, the most important of which was the South Side Turnverein. Turnvereins, or Turner Clubs, were a mainstay of German American life during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Founded on the principle of “sound body and mind,” the Turnverein movement was spearheaded by German educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who believed physical exercise and cultural activities led to a healthy life. The South Side Turnverein in Indianapolis, founded on September 24, 1893, began as an offshoot of another organization when about 200 German Americans left the Socialer Turnverein to form their own gymnastics club on the south side. During its first few months, the South Side Turnverein and its members experienced challenges growing the group. That all changed when the membership elected Henry Victor as President, or “First Speaker,” of the organization in September of 1894. He threw himself into the role, rapidly expanding the club’s memberships and activities.
Mr. Victor took charge of the work in the spring of 1894, when all efforts to complete the organization and make it a success had failed, and at a time when those supporting the society were losing faith in the undertaking. The enthusiasm and the effectiveness with which he assumed control of the work inspired those interested, and at once new life was put into the organization, and in less than a year a membership of had been secured.
Arguably his greatest accomplishment as South Side Turnverein president was overseeing the building of its hall, serving as one of the South Side Turnverein Hall Association’s directors. Leading such a large financial endeavor proved natural to Victor, as his experience with Mozart Hall as well as the German Mutual Insurance Company prepared him for the task. Plans to build the hall started on February 20, 1900, when the South Side Turnverein decided to purchase 150 feet of property on Prospect Street at a cost of $5,000. On March 7, Victor and others filed articles of incorporation for the South Side Turnverein Hall Association, whose charge was to “purchase real estate and to sell the same and particularly to construct and erect for the South Side Turnverein a suitable gymnasium.”
The interior will be arranged with all the appointments of a modern club house. The basement, which will be a full story in hight [sic], will contain the kneipe [bar], bowling alleys, dining-room, women’s parlor, women’s and men’s dressing rooms and shower baths. The main floor will be almost entirely taken up by the large hall, which is also to be used as a gymnasium. This hall will seat, together with gallery, about 700 people. At the east end of the hall there will be a large and well equipped stage. Stretching along the other end of the hall will be a large foyer, with stairways leading to the basement and gallery.
After months of intense work, the South Side Turnverein Hall was completed, and on December 2, the club opened its hall to the public, on the organization’s eight-year anniversary. “In the afternoon the new building was thrown open to the public,” the News reported, “and it was inspected by a large number of visitors.”
South Side Turnverein Hall in the Journal Handbook of Indianapolis by Max Robinson Hyman, 1902. Google Books.
The South Side Turnverein formally dedicated its new hall on January 20, 1901, with 3,000 people in attendance. Victor christened the new building along with Fred Mark, chairman of the building committee, Herman Lieber, president of the North American Turnerbund, and Charles E. Emmerich, superintendent of the Manual Training School, among others. The building and grounds had a cumulative cost of $25,000, raised through its members by the association. A banquet for around 400 people was held the night after the dedication, with the News writing, “Henry Victor, as master of ceremonies, welcomed the representatives of the various German societies at the ‘kommers,’ [or students’ entertainment] with which the South Side Turnverein last night closed the dedicatory services of its new hall. Many women were among the 400 guests and the evening was enjoyable.” In only a a few years, Henry Victor transformed the South Side Turnverein from a small but promising organization into one of Indianapolis’ leading social clubs for the German American community.
The membership of the South Side Turnverein reelected Henry Victor to President many times and he continued to serve with distinction until 1905. However, towards the end of this life, he shifted gears to help organize a singing society. A long-time singer with the Fourth Christian Church with a “good voice,” as described by the Indianapolis News, Victor helped incorporate the “The Suedsite Liedertafel,” or “South Side Singing Society” in 1910. He served as the president and the organization performed regularly at the South Side Turnverein. Boasting over 200 members and nearly fifty active members, the organization maintained a men’s chorus, a women’s chorus, and a children’s chorus. The society served as more than just an outlet for those who loved to sing; it also wanted to preserve German culture. As the News reported, “in addition to the singing, the society endeavors to conserve a correct use of the German language.”
Unfortunately, his work with the South Side Singing Society was tragically cut short when he died on September 24, 1910, after a week in the hospital following a stroke. Many German American societies attended his funeral at the South Side Turnverein Hall, and some sang music in tribute, something he likely would have appreciated. The IndianapolisStar wrote in his obituary that “Mr. Victor was interested in the South Side Turnverein and the flourishing condition of the society is attributed largely to his efforts.” In addition to the South Side Turnverein, he belonged to the Columbia Lodge, the Knights of Pythias, and the German Heritage Society, to name a few. Newspaper accounts noted that he was a “marked personality among Germans of city” and “a man of mystery, and it was not known what were his family relations previous to coming to this city [Indianapolis].” He left behind a $60,000 estate, a testament to his acumen for business.
The life of Henry Victor is but one extraordinary story among the annals of the German American experience in Indiana. A man whose former home left him nearly destitute, he set out for the United States to build a better life, and his decades in Indianapolis served as a prime example of his ability and devotion to the community he called his own. From his successful management of Mozart Hall to his trailblazing leadership of the South Side Turnverein, Victor left a large impression wherever he went in Indianapolis, gaining a reputation for hard work and honest entrepreneurialism. He also dedicated himself to the preservation of German culture through his South Side Singing Society, another fruitful organization he helped found merely months away from his death. In all that he was, Henry Victor personified not only German Americans, but German Hoosiers, an immigrant community that profoundly shaped the history of the State of Indiana.
Tony Valainis, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 2008, IUPUI Image Collection, accessed Indiana Memory.
St. Mary Catholic Church is an architectural gem. Its gothic towers help define the downtown Indianapolis skyline, while its bells call the faithful to worship. For its congregation certainly, but also for those dining and shopping in the Mass. Ave. Cultural District, the cathedral provides a moment of stately beauty in the urban landscape. But St. Mary’s is more than an elegant building. It is a love story—one set into motion by a kind matchmaking priest.
Hermann Joseph Gaul, n.d., personal collection of Lisa Dillman Wright, accessed AncestryLibrary.com
Herman (also spelled Hermann) J. Gaul was born in Germany in 1869 and immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s.[1] He was a devoted Catholic who loved the architecture of Germany’s churches, especially the Cathedral of Cologne. From an early age, he aimed to bring this gothic vision to the Midwest. In the early 1890s, he began an apprenticeship with the renowned Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.[2] In 1891, Sullivan’s Chicago firm sent Gaul to Indianapolis for several months to supervise the building of a new plant for the Home Brewing Company.[3]
Home Brewing Company Brew-House, 1900-1910, Ray Hinz Collection, courtesy of Indiana Album, accessed Indiana Memory.
The beer company incorporated in the summer of 1891 with $200,000 in stocks from notable residents. Construction, at a cost of $70,000, began soon after. The company was influential enough to garner city permission to construct a switch that would allow shipping via railroad right out of its backyard—not without some objection over this “bow to the brewers” from temperance factions in the city. The Home Brewing Company began operations early in 1892 and was a huge financial success.[4]
For the local business community, this ambitious and visible project made Gaul a young architect to watch. For the ladies of Indianapolis’s German Catholic community, it would have made him a fetching romantic prospect. And luckily for Gaul, the 1890s were actually a great time to fall in love.
Romance Card, 1912, Greeting Car Collection, Vigo County Historical Society, accessed Indiana Memory.
In previous eras, women’s labor was necessary for a couple’s survival and a man seeking a wife looked for someone who would make an economic contribution to the farm or family business—regardless of his personal feelings for her. On the flip side, a young woman’s family would make a similar financially-minded decision, using her to link two families together to build wealth — regardless of the bride’s feelings for her groom. Of course, financial concerns never disappeared from matchmaking, but by the eighteenth century, love became more central to a match, and romantic marriage became more common.
Nineteenth century conventions placed more emphasis on the husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker. And while this social construct had some serious political and economic disadvantages for women, it did allow for the consideration of romantic love in choosing one’s spouse. [5] Gaul’s luck at being born in this period and his dedication to his faith soon led to his own romantic match.
When he arrived in Indianapolis in 1891, Gaul knew that he wanted to stay in the home of a respectable German Catholic family as opposed to a hotel or boarding house. He was also eager to find a spiritual home. He looked to St. Mary, the heart of the German Catholic community, located at that time on Maryland Street. Indianapolis German Catholics and regional Catholic leadership had organized this church for German-speaking congregants in the 1850s. In addition to serving the community’s spiritual needs, St. Mary was also the cultural hub for the local German immigrant community, hosting concerts, theatrical performances, and festivals featuring traditional German food and entertainment.[6]
Gaul’s first stop in his new city was the home of Father Anthony Scheideler, pastor at St. Mary since 1874. Father Scheideler knew his congregants well. So when Gaul asked him to recommend a nice family who might take him in as a boarder and who lived near the Home Brewing Company construction site, Scheideler immediately had the right fit: the Seiter family. They were also of German origin and described by Scheideler as “one of the best families in my parish.”[7] Christopher Seiter, the patriarch, owned a saloon, while his wife, Cecelia, took care of the home and their children. In his two months with the Seiters, the young architect fell in love with their daughter, Mary, who was about sixteen years old, seven years younger than Gaul. He was smitten but would have to be patient for several more years. With a smile on his face that the pastor remembered decades later, Gaul told Father Scheideler:
I am going back to Chicago, but I shall return soon. I have found the oldest daughter of Mr. Seiter very interesting.[8]
Father Scheideler was pleased with the match. It’s not clear how often Gaul returned to visit Mary or if they stayed in touch mainly by mail, but he kept his promise to return. On April 22, 1896, Father Scheideler officiated the wedding of Herman Gaul and Mary Seiter at St. Mary Catholic Church.[9]
“Personal and Society,” Indianapolis Journal, April 14, 1896, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
On his wedding day, Gaul thanked the pastor for connecting him “to such an estimable family” and told him he would never forget his kindness. He vowed:
If you ever build a new church, Father Scheideler, I will be the architect.[10]
It seemed like the kind of lofty promise a young man would make on an emotional day, and the pastor “laughed and thanked the enthusiastic young architect but gave no further thought to his promise.”[11]
R.W.R. Capes, Sacred Heart Church, n.d., architect: Herman J. Gaul, Building a Nation: Indiana Limestone Photograph Collection, Indiana University Bloomington, accessed Indiana Memory.
Gaul and his new wife moved to Chicago. He opened his own architecture firm and grew his career over the following decade, building a half dozen churches as well as schools, orphanages, and hospitals for German institutions around the Midwest. One major commission, St. Nicholas Church in Evanston, Illinois, stood proudly on an elevated site with “romantic ambience.”[12]
Over the following years, Herman and Mary Gaul welcomed seven children. Unsurprisingly, Mary’s name doesn’t appear in newspapers outside of a real estate transfer (along with Herman’s name). She seems to have been busy taking care of her large family with little time to lead a literary or church club that would have landed her coverage in newspapers. But we can assume their marriage was a happy one, since Gaul still felt inspired by it to fulfill the promise he made in Indianapolis.[13]
Turn Verein Eiche, n.d., American Turners Local Societies Collection, IUPUI Digital Collections, accessed Indiana Memory.
Meanwhile in the Circle City, the German immigrant population continued to grow, as did the congregation of St. Mary Catholic Church. Father Scheideler knew he would soon need a bigger building. In 1906, the pastorate purchased land at the intersection of Vermont and New Jersey as a future investment with “no thought of building immediately entertained.”[14] Nonetheless, local newspapers printed news of the transfer.
Sanborn Insurance Maps of Indianapolis, Vol. 1, 1914, Library of Congress, accessed Historical Information Gatherers via Indiana State Library.
Father Scheideler may have “practically forgot Herman Gaul and his promise to draw the plans for a new St. Mary’s,” but Gaul had not forgotten. When the architect read about the new St. Mary property in the newspaper, he quickly left for Indianapolis. Father Sheideler opened his door and there was Gaul, again wearing that memorable smile. The architect said, “I have come to make good my promise to draw plans for a new St. Mary’s.” Father Sheideler told him that unfortunately they did not yet have the funding to build, but Gaul was undeterred. He replied, “Well, I am going to draw the plans anyhow, true to my word.”[15]
James Palik, Cologne Cathedral, Germany, photograph, n.d., UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/292/.
The two men spent hours chatting and catching up and soon discovered that they were both born near the Cathedral of Cologne in Germany. Gaul shared that he had dreamed of building a church like it since he was a boy—a building that would “bear the stamp of its beauty.” Father Sheideler doubted that such a feat was possible but the architect said simply, “Well, we shall try.”[16]
Several months later the driver of an express wagon arrived at the pastor’s door bearing a large package: Gaul’s plan for “a miniature cathedral of Cologne” in Indianapolis. Father Scheideler shared the plans with leading St. Mary congregants and “Herman Gaul’s dream for a new St. Mary’s spread through the parish.”[17]
Indianapolis News, September 9, 1912, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.
In spring 1910, clergy and parishioners, assisted by hundreds of Catholic school children, broke ground on a new location for St. Mary’s at Vermont and New Jersey Streets.[18] That fall, the congregation laid the cornerstone.[19] By July 1912, the new building was complete. The Indianapolis News ran a feature on its architecture with the headline: “After Twenty Years Herman Gaul Makes Good His Wedding Day Pledge to Plan for the St. Mary’s Parish a Miniature Cathedral of Cologne.”[20]
Indianapolis News, July 6, 1912, accessed Newspapers.com.
While we don’t have a record of Herman’s love for his wife Mary in letters or diaries, we see their love reflected in his tribute to her and to his faith. Recorded for posterity in the architecture of St. Mary is one German immigrant’s joy at finding a partner to share his Catholic faith and German traditions, and with whom he built a family and home in addition to a church. And he owed it all to one savvy matchmaker, Father Scheideler, who just might have known what he was doing from the start.
Notes
[1] Passport Application, September 7, 1893, No. 4331, Roll 410, National Archives and Records Administration, accessed AncestryLibrary.com; Twelfth Census of the United States, June 14, 1900, Chicago Ward 14, Cook County, Illinois, roll 262, page 13, National Archives and Records Administration, accessed AncestryLibrary.com. On his passport application, Gaul declared he immigrated to the U.S. in 1886.
[2] Edward R. Kantowicz, “To Build the Catholic City,” Chicago History 14, No. 3 (Fall 1985): 14, accessed Chicago History Museum.
[3] “After Twenty Years Herman Gaul Makes Good His Wedding Day Pledge to Plan for the St. Mary’s Parish A Miniature Cathedral of Cologne,” Indianapolis News, July 6, 1912, 13, accessed Newspapers.com.
[4] “Articles of Incorporation,” Indianapolis Journal, June 23, 1891, 8, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Minor City Matters,” Indianapolis Journal, August 26, 1891, 6, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Bow to the Brewers,” Indianapolis Journal, November 3, 1891, 8, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Industrial Notes,” Indianapolis Journal, January 4, 1892, 6, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[5] “The History of Romance,” February 13, 2017, National Women’s History Museum, accessed https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/history-romance.
[6] “Religious Ceremony,” Indianapolis State Sentinel, August 26, 1857, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Laying of the Corner Stone of the German Catholic Church,” Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, September 1, 1857, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; No title, Indianapolis Daily Sentinel, May 14, 1858, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “The German Catholic Church, Maryland,” Daily State Sentinel, August 13, 1858, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; McEvoy’s Indianapolis City Directory and Business Mirror (Indianapolis: H. N. McEvoy Publisher, 1858), 219, accessed IUPUI Library Digital Collections; “Dedication,” Daily State Sentinel, September 12, 1859, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[7] “After Twenty Years Herman Gaul Makes Good His Wedding Day Pledge,” 13.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “Personal and Society,” Indianapolis Journal, April 14, 1896, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[10] “After Twenty Years Herman Gaul Makes Good His Wedding Day Pledge,” 13.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Kantowicz, 14.
[13] Conclusion gleaned from searching census records and Chicago newspapers.
[14] “After Twenty Years Herman Gaul Makes Good His Wedding Day Pledge,” 13.
[15-17] Ibid.
[18] “Church Ground Broken,” Indianapolis Star, May 2, 1910, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
[19] “Lays Cornerstone of New St. Mary’s,” Indianapolis Star, October 24, 1910, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
[20] “After Twenty Years Herman Gaul Makes Good His Wedding Day Pledge,” 13.
This post draws on more extensive research completed by the author, Cory Balkenbusch, and Jennifer Mara DeSilva. For a full article on this research, see “Toleration of Sex Work in East Central Indiana, 1880-1900” in the upcoming December 2023 edition of the Indiana Magazine of History.
In April of 1894, Muncie policemen Ball, Cole, and Coffey assisted Chief Miller on a raid of a “Palace o’ Pleasure.” When the officers arrived, they discovered “six very well-known young gentlemen,” who were “being entertained” by four women.[1]The Muncie Daily Herald revealed that the young men and their paid female company swiftly scraped together enough money and valuables to give bond, with one man even giving an officer a valuable diamond stud that was given to him by his mother.[2] The resort, located on Vine Street, was owned by a woman who went by the name of Rosenthal. It quickly became notorious for its illicit activities, with another raid occurring in May of 1894, in which four girls and seven men were arrested and charged with “associating.”[3]
Muncie newspaper readers during this era would not find the reports regarding Rosenthal’s “Palace O’ Pleasure” terribly shocking. During the Gas Boom, sex work was increasingly becoming a part of Muncie’s cultural and social landscape. By the end of the nineteenth century, a substantial reservoir of natural gas was discovered in East Central Indiana, prompting surrounding cities like Muncie, Anderson, and Kokomo to rush to discover their own supply.[4] Despite commonly-held assumptions about American small towns and cities, they were not isolated from the influence of their distant metropolitan cousins. In the two decades before the twentieth century, new railway, telegraph, and telephone connections linked small towns and cities more intimately with the urban centers.
As historians Frank Felsenstein and James Connolly have argued, Muncie, Indiana reflected this rural-urban network. Their research has contrasted Robert and Helen Lynds’ depiction of a sleepy agricultural center recently industrialized in their landmark 1929 study Middletown.[5] However, historians have chiefly focused on the city’s cultural achievements and technological progress brought upon by the Gas Boom, ignoring a large facet of the economy: the exchange of sexual services. Indeed, between 1880 to 1900, the Gas Boom and subsequent industrialization spearheaded the growth of Muncie’s sexual exchange network. This played an integral role within its growing economy.
The Gas Boom, Working Class Men, & The Rise of Sex Work
“Muncie, Indiana: The Natural Gas City of the West” (Muncie Natural Gas Land Improvement Company, ca. 1889), 28, accessed Ball State University Digital Media Repository.
By the spring of 1887, the Muncie Natural Gas Company laid gas mains across most sections of town and was piping inexpensive gas to individual households and businesses.[6] Within that same year, gas had replaced the need for coal, leaving the city free from soot and ash. Forward-thinking businessmen like James Boyce, a member of Muncie’s board of trade, energetically pursued business ventures both for personal gain and to bring new factories to town. Boyce persuaded the Over window glass plant, the Hemingray bottle plant, and the famed Ball Brothers Company to build in Muncie. The working population doubled from 5,500 in 1886 to 11,345 in 1890, and Muncie was quickly becoming the largest city in the Indiana Gas Belt.[7] In turn, the city’s industrial and demographic explosion after 1886 entirely transformed Muncie’s neighborhoods and entertainment districts. By the end of the century, almost seven times the number of original saloons operated throughout the city and nearly double the number of boarding houses and hotels lined Walnut Street.[8]
As Muncie’s working-class male population grew, saloons became spaces for men to socialize and relieve the stresses of factory work. Relief could be found in conversation, intoxication, sport or musical entertainment, and female company. Sex work often accompanied the development of urban, commercial, and transportation infrastructure.[9] As the north-south artery running straight through the city, Walnut Street connected Muncie’s downtown district with the railway depot. It continued into a new residential area that grew beyond the railway tracks to support workers at the surrounding factories. The Southside neighborhood’s location, at the intersections of the C.C.C. & St. Louis Railroad Lines and the L.E. & W. Railroad Lines, coupled with its proximity to the commercial district, made it a hotbed for sex work. The steady flow of newcomers and addition of boarding houses and saloons around the train depots provided potential clients and encounter sites. As early as 1890, Muncie’s newspapers reported Southside sex workers and their clients being arrested and fined.
Establishing Networks & the Commercialization of a Sex Work
Boardinghouse located above a saloon at 815 South Walnut Street on the 1896 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, accessed Library of Congress.
While the Southside was largely cut off from Muncie’s wealthier commercial district by railway lines, the saloons that lined Walnut Street to the north continued to the south. The 1886 Sanborn map identifies a barber, grocer, jeweler, and three saloons that occupied a block between 1st and 2nd Streets. Sanborn maps show that east of Walnut Street, the Southside neighborhood was made up of houses, bringing businesses like the Muncie Lumber Company, the Artificial Gas Works, the Muncie Foundry & Machine Shop, and the Anheuser-Busch Beer Depot. Although it is hard to determine if these dwellings functioned as boarding houses, there was one known boarding house listed on the 1896 Sanborn map.
The boarding house was located off Walnut Street and might have offered factory men a livable space close to their place of employment. This boarding house occupied the same building as a saloon, with two additional saloons and one restaurant nearby, underlining the proximity to possible prostitution. Widows frequently ran boardinghouses to replace their lost husband’s income. However, the commercialization of women’s labor degraded her role as “keeper of the house.”[10] This highlights the effects of the Victorian middle-class ideals, as paid labor was viewed as a masculine activity. Moreover, contemporaries viewed boarding houses with suspicion because they often sheltered single women and men in proximity, which undermined the idealized purity of middle-class homes. The possibility of sexual activity between unmarried men and women cast suspicion on boarding houses, and aligned them with brothels, which sometimes masqueraded as “female boarding houses” on Sanborn fire insurance maps.[11]
To find direct evidence of sex work, one needed only to follow South Walnut Street into Muncie’s Southside. Much like Chicago’s sex district, known as the Levee, Muncie’s Southside brothels operated openly, and some women used boardinghouses to meet clients.[12] Unlike middle-class neighborhoods in the northern half of the city that were cut off from factory development and train depots, the Southside sheltered working-class men and families that moved to Muncie as new factories opened. From the late 1880s, women engaging in the sex trade gravitated towards the neighborhood. The number of established brothels, sex workers employed in this area, and the prevalence of their arrests reported in the newspapers evinced this movement.
Walnut Street at Patterson Block railroad construction, Muncie, Indiana, ca. 1900s, Muncie and Delaware County Historic Photographs Collection, accessed Ball State University Digital Media Repository.
Not long after he acquired it from Henry Coppersmith, John Mullenix’s saloon earned a reputation for being an “awful, wicked, sinful joint,” and one of the “toughest holes in Indiana.” Mullenix arranged for Minnie White, also known as “Gas Well Minnie,” to use the saloon as a base for exchanging sexual services.[13] The saloon’s location positioned both Mullenix and White to make a profit from travelers, as well as local factory workers. The saloon, located about a block south of the railroad line, was surrounded by four large manufacturing plants, ensuring patronage. Additionally, about twelve dwellings on the saloon’s block might have served as boarding houses for the men working close by. Elsewhere, tavern keepers relied on sex workers to attract customers, while women often relied on tavern keepers for a space to engage in their sexual services, much like Mullenix and White did in Muncie.[14]
However, women engaging in sex work did not limit themselves to working-class neighborhoods and saloons. Indeed, Muncie’s entertainment and business district offered some women the chance to profit from wealthier clientele. The High Street Theater reflected this trend noted by other historians, as concert halls and theaters became popular new venues for sex and entertainment by the beginning of the twentieth century.[15] Located directly across the street from Delaware County’s courthouse, the theater’s wine rooms were open all hours of the day. Initially, the newspapers portrayed wine rooms as a sign of the city’s metropolitan character, but by 1900 they were a source of communal outrage.[16]
Venues like the High Street Theater catered to a wealthier clientele than the Southside working-class. Clients paid an entrance fee, after which they climbed a stairwell that led to small apartments overlooking the theater’s main auditorium. These semi-private rooms were essentially pine boxes with lace curtains to conceal the activity from the audience down below. In these wine rooms, scantily clad women encouraged clients to buy drinks and other services. These costs required a clientele with sufficient disposable income, something most of Muncie’s factory workers could not claim.[17]
An undercover police officer noted that “Age and color [were] no disqualifications” to visit the theater, making it clear that vice activities attracted far more wealthier men than young factory workers. [18] While single factory workers might have money to spend, Muncie’s older and wealthier men also visited the theater. In 1895, Rhoda Jones arrived at the High Street Theater Restaurant and attempted to climb the staircase to find her husband, George Jones. Although the attendant claimed that the wine-rooms were closed at 11pm, Rhoda was insistent that her husband was present. She argued that each night he walked north from their grocery store on South Walnut Street to visit the wine-room women.[19] Although Rhoda’s arrival appeared in the next day’s newspaper, her husband’s departure was more covert. For men like George, the theater also had alleyway access to several city streets, allowing all clients to make easy escapes and discreet entrances.
Property Ownership & Economic Profitability
The Muncie Daily Times, January 26, 1896, accessed Newspapers.com.
Social reform efforts in the late 1890s underlined the development of a new vice district. By early 1896, Southside citizens had mobilized a reform campaign. On January 26, 1896, the Muncie Daily Times described an attempt to close organized brothels. Between Walnut and Vine Streets, stretching to the C.C.C. and St. Louis Railroad tracks, down towards Ninth Street, the Muncie Daily Times reported that citizens held a “feeling of disgrace” living among houses of “ill-repute.”[20] The tension and notoriety surrounding prostitution is apparent from the newspaper’s willingness to identify prominent brothel owners. Between 1887 and 1896, it had become clear to Muncie’s Southside that an extensive prostitution network had developed. Newspaper accounts sensationalized and corroborated citizens’ concerns. “Soiled Doves” and “Women of ill-repute,” such as Emma Bryant, Hazel Gray, and Kate Phinney, provided Muncie’s newspapers with frequent material for reports of their sexual escapades and commerce.
The effort to close brothels within the Southside neighborhood also revealed the prominent role that sex work played within Muncie’s booming economy. Numerous newspaper articles, like that published by The MuncieDaily Times on January 26, 1896, highlighted the extensive network of female-owned brothels and the way they generated city profits through county court fines. Despite the continuous raids these women faced, city officials never forced their brothels to shut down. Their services, and the fines that these raids produced, were an integral part of the Muncie’s urban economy.
“They Say It Is A Nuisance: Several Citizens File and Affidavit Against Kate Phinney,” Muncie Morning News, May 19, 1892, accessed Newspapers.com.
For example, in 1891, The Muncie Daily Times reported on a brothel raid that occurred on Third Street, outing five individual women working at the location, including the proprietress, Minnie Dwyer. Those arrested and put before the judge pleaded guilty to prostitution, paying fines of $16.85.[21] Dwyer was not the only woman running a brothel, however. In 1892, the Muncie Morning News reported that nearly “one hundred citizens” gathered to discuss Kate Phinney’s “house of ill-fame,” and ultimately decided it was a nuisance.[22] The Southside’s saloons, boarding houses, and brothels became woven into this area’s economy of leisure, transiency, and commercial sex.
Emma Bryant was one of the most prominent sex workers and brothel owners in the area, appearing six times in the Delaware County Court Records for her involvement in vice activity, including prostitution, witness to prostitution, and witness to violent crimes.[23] However, the newspapers revealed that Bryant often paid hefty fines rather than serving jail time. As early as 1894, Bryant’s “bawdy house” was raided by police, but remained opened.[24] Her brothel on Council Street, known as Gaiety Commons, appeared later in 1895 in The Muncie Morning News when Bryant along with seven young men and two young women were arrested on charges related to the illegal monetary exchange of sexual services.[25] That same year, Bryant was arrested for selling alcohol without a license, but she paid $200 (equivalent to $6,117.81 today) and was released.[26] Despite the continuous raids these women faced, city officials never forced their brothels to shut down. As historian Ruth Rosen has described, sex workers’ services, and the fines that these raids produced, were an integral part of the urban economy in many American cities.[27] Muncie sex workers produced considerable revenue for the city through the fines they paid.
Prostitution on the Southside bolstered the city’s real estate economy. Muncie sex workers actively engaged in purchasing and selling property and securing mortgages. Kate Phinney and Hazel Gray weathered frequent raids, but always found a new location for their businesses. Phinney faced a plethora of fines and charges related to prostitution but remained an integral part of the vice district, moving her brothel from South Plum Street into Shedtown (current-day Avondale neighborhood). Hazel Gray, appearing as early as 1894 in the newspapers, moved her brothel from Second Street to Third Street. Like Phinney, Gray also faced numerous prostitution charges until she left town in 1897. Phinney’s and Gray’s ability to move around the Southside suggest that there was a tolerance of the profession among city officials.
“After Questionable Houses: There Will Be None Left in Muncie After March 10,” Muncie Morning News, February 20, 1896, accessed Newspapers.com.
The Southside citizens were seemingly successful in their efforts to close the local brothels. The Muncie Morning News reported that by March 1896, brothels run by Emma Bryant, Kate Phinney, and others had been shut down.[28] However, many of these “businesswomen of ill-repute” did not leave Muncie. According to the Muncie City Directory, Emma Bryant was still living on South Willard Street in 1901. Muncie’s 1897 city directory listed Hazel Gray as living at 138 Kinney Street. These directories reveal that, although their brothels were initially shuttered, these women moved freely about Muncie, redefining the vice district limits.
By 1900, 347 manufacturing establishments operated within the city and Muncie boasted a population of 20,942. However, the industrial optimism brought on by the discovery of natural gas would not last long. By the beginning of the 20th century, gas pressure dropped to nearly 100 pounds and many large factories could no longer obtain the natural gas they had so heavily utilized during the previous decade. This caused many factories to find other means of production or shut down. Unlike smaller cities in Eastern Indiana, like Fairmount and Eaton, the growth of Muncie’s railway lines provided convenient access to coal, raw materials, and markets for finished manufactured products, which maintained its industrial prominence after the gas ran out. The movement of factories closer to the railway lines prompted Muncie to grow in all directions, with new industrial areas materializing at both the north and south ends of the city.
Muncie’s sex work industry continued to follow the Walnut Street corridor, then flowing out towards industrial areas. As in other cities, the industry maintained a connection to the city’s entertainment district throughout the Gilded Age, providing clients with easy access to vice. However, during the Progressive Era, sex work was forced underground. As social reformers sought to solves issues created by Gilded Age industrialization, Gas Boom Muncie offers historians a chance to understand how Gilded Age vices took hold of smaller-scale urban spaces, creating a new narrative of how these areas reflect larger city trends when regarding the link between sex work and the local economy.
Notes:
[1] “A Large Catch,” The Muncie Daily Herald, April 5, 1894, accessed Newspapers.com.
[3] “Vine Street Joint,” The Muncie Morning News, June 1, 1894, accessed Newspapers.com.
[4] James Glass, “The Gas Boom in Central Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History 96, no. 4 (2000): 315.
[5] Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly, What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), p. 17-20; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), p. 5-6.
[6] Remarkably, in 1892 the state reported that 2,500 square miles of natural gas could be located across Central Indiana making it the largest known gas field—larger than the Pennsylvania and Ohio fields combined. Glass, “The Gas Boom in Central Indiana,” 315.
[7] Glass, “The Gas Boom in Central Indiana,” 318.
[9] Katie M. Hemphill, “Selling Sex and Intimacy in the City: The Changing Business of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore,” in Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America, eds. Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 169.
[10] Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 60.
[11] Kristi L. Palmer, “Fire Insurance Maps: Introduction and Glimpses into America’s Glass Manufacturing History,” The News Journal 20, no. 4 (2013): 4; Gamber, The Boardinghouse in the Nineteenth Century, p. 102-103.
[12] Cynthia M. Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 27.
[13] “For Min White and Bomb Shell for The Quart Shop: The Police and Residents of South Walnut Street Very Sore on John Mullenix’s Wicked Joint,” TheMuncie Morning News, March 12, 1893, accessed Newspapers.com.
[14] Hemphill, “Selling Sex and Intimacy in the City,” p. 172-173.
[15] Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 224; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900 -1918 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 83-84.
[16] “A Wine Room,” The Daily Muncie Herald, November 15, 1892, accessed Newspapers.com.
[17] “Muncie’s Den of Iniquity,” The Star Press, January 28, 1900, accessed Newspapers.com.
[19] “After Hubby,” The Muncie Morning News, April 5, 1895, accessed Newspapers.com.
[20] “After the Resorts: Southside Citizens Organize to Fight Them,” The Muncie Daily Times, January 26, 1896, accessed Newspapers.com.
[21] “A Third Street Joint Raided and Ten Victims Gathered,” The Muncie Daily Times, October 26, 1891, accessed Newspapers.com.
[22] Phinney had been charged with keeping a house of ill-fame as early as 1890, and then again in 1895 and 1898; Delaware County Circuit Criminal Court, Cause #2547 (1890), 3031 (1895), 3480 (1898); “They Say It Is A Nuisance: Several Citizens File and Affidavit Against Kate Phinney,” Muncie Morning News, May 19, 1892, accessed Newspapers.com.
[23] Delaware County Circuit Criminal Court, Cause #3546 (1897), 3494 (1898), 3737 (1900), 8409 (1927).
[24] “Bawdy Houses Raided: The Inmates of Three Bagino’s [sic] in Courts To-Day,” The Muncie Daily Times, January 1, 1894, accessed Newspapers.com.
[25] “It Comes High: But the Boys Will Stray Into The Path That Leads to Headquarters,” Muncie Morning News, March 19, 1895, accessed Newspapers.com.
[26] “In The Hands of U.S. Officials,” The Muncie Daily Times, March 2, 1895, accessed Newspapers.com.
Slave Registry, Indiana Territory, Knox County, 1805-1807, Early Vincennes Collection, Knox County Public Library, accessed Indiana Memory.
Black Hoosiers helped shape Indiana by establishing early farming communities, preserving the Union through service in the Civil War, gaining suffrage for women in the 1920s, defending democracy in WWI and WWII, and expanding equality and political power throughout the Civil Rights Era and beyond. But Black Hoosiers also suffered enslavement in Indiana, violent persecution, discrimination in jobs and housing, Jim Crow laws, and lynching.
Many Black Hoosiers and Black Americans continue to feel the stress imposed both by the continued disproportionate violence against people of color as well as the inherited traumas of the past. Already facing entrenched and systemic racism in American culture, people of color have additional burden of social media and news outlets filled with images of violence, sometimes fatal, against Black people. These images only reinforce the brutal American legacy of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow.[1]
This racial trauma impacts mental health, sleep patterns, appetite, fertility, and susceptibility to disease, among other detriments. According to Safe Black Space, a community organization promoting healing, people of color “are experiencing trauma related to systemic racism and are feeling the impact of our humanity not being valued.” Their statement continues:
Some of us avoid our feelings or numb out. Some of us experience fear that something bad is going to happen to us or to our loved ones. Some of us are struggling with rage and frustration. It can be overwhelming.[2]
“Trinity United Methodist Church (Muncie),” photograph, 1948, Other Side of Middletown Photographs, Ball State University Digital Media Repository, accessed Indiana Memory.
But sacred Black spaces have been and continue to be essential to healing from this trauma, feeling safe, breathing deeply, and reclaiming health. The history of overt racism and violence inflicted on Black Hoosiers by their white neighbors makes clear just how important Indiana’s African American churches were to Black Hoosiers in centuries past. Since at least the early 19th century, Black Hoosiers gathered in small churches across the state to worship, celebrate, and socialize – but also to organize opposition to voter suppression and the Klan, to form local NAACP and Urban League branches, and organize protests and rallies that furthered civil rights.
Local history can show us the extraordinary in the ordinary, the bravery of average folks, and the work of a community to make the world just a little better. Allen Temple in Marion, Indiana was not unlike other Black churches in the Midwest or even others in Grant County. And yet, Allen Temple pastors and members pushed their community to desegregate, to increase rights of African Americans, and to stop violence against Black Marion residents. And those feats are no less remarkable for being reflected by other churches. The Civil Rights Movement and the gains it brought Black Americans was not an inevitable wave of progress. This wave was made up of individual droplets of hard work and bravery by small groups of people like those who found a home at Allen Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Family of Joseph and Martha Pettiford at Weaver Settlement, n.d., accessed Free African Americans.
Allen Temple’s history is rooted in Weaver Settlement. Black pioneers fleeing threats to their freedom in southern slave states founded this nearby Grant County community by the 1840s. Weaver grew over the decades as the pioneers were joined by other free and formerly enslaved families. These hardworking Black settlers established productive farms and the settlement grew to over 3000 acres by 1860. As the self-sustaining community thrived, residents built schools, churches, and stores, and male residents participated in the political process. But farmers could only divide their land between so many children before the plot would no longer be able to sustain a family. One or two children would inherit the farm, while others would have to find work elsewhere. By the 1880s, the descendants of the settler-farmers were looking to Marion for employment opportunities.[3]
As more African Americans moved to Marion, the Rev. G. W. Shelton, who served as pastor of Hill’s Chapel at Weaver Settlement, began organizing a new A.M.E. church in South Marion. Marion residents had already established an A.M.E church on 5th Street in the city’s downtown, but Weaver residents settling on the southside needed both a religious and civic center in that area. Rev. Shelton completed the organization of the as-yet-unnamed church in September 1900. Church and county histories report that the congregation first gathered in a private home. By November 1901, the congregation purchased the church building at Washington and Thirty-Fifth Streets from a Protestant congregation.[4]
Indiana Department of Natural Resources, “Allen Temple African Methodist Episcopal,” IHSSI County Survey, SHAARD Database, Indiana Historic Buildings, Bridges and Cemeteries Map, accessed arcgis.com.“South Marion,” Indianapolis Recorder, February 7, 1903, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles.
Most of the information about Allen Temple’s early history comes from columns in the Indianapolis Recorder reporting on the Black communities of Weaver and Marion. For several years of the church’s early history, the newspaper referred to the church as “the South Marion Mission” or “the 35th Street A. M. E. Church.” From 1901 to 1904, church leadership organized a choir, raised funds for improvements, and established a Sabbath School. Congregants hosted social dinners, Thanksgiving suppers, and lectures by prominent religious leaders.[5]
“Pastor of the 35th Street Church,” Marion News-Tribune, July 23, 1905, 7, microfilm, Marion Public Library.
In 1905, the congregation finished remodeling the building and the church joined the Indiana A.M.E. Conference, officially making it a part of the larger A.M.E. hierarchy and organization. Finally, on July 23, 1905, the church received the name Allen Temple during a “grand rally.” More than 600 African American residents of Marion and surrounding communities attended a corner stone laying celebration. Allen Temple Rev. J. J. Evans, leading regional A.M.E. clergy, the prestigious “colored Masons,” and the Marion mayor were among those who led the ceremonies. Church leaders chose the name Allen Temple to honor Bishop Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination.[6]
Over the following decades, Allen Temple hosted fundraisers and revivals, often sharing members and pastors with Hill’s Chapel, and worked to pay off its mortgage.[7] Meanwhile, Marion prospered from the gas boom and industrial workers organized and became more political. By the end of WWI, the city boomed. According to historian James Madison, “Lining the Courthouse Square in the 1920s were banks, clothing stores, drug stores, ice cream parlors, cigar stores, and theaters, some spreading a block or so off the square.” Black Marion residents were among the city’s business owners, professionals and civic employees. But they were not welcome everywhere in their own hometown.[8]
“Washington Street, Marion, Ind.,” postcard, c. 1911, Postcards of the Jay Small Collection, Indiana Historical Society Digital Collections, accessed Indiana Memory.
Black residents did not have access to a number of Marion businesses and recreational attractions. Segregation was the rule, despite the 1885 Indiana Civil Rights Act that legally gave African Americans the right to patronize these establishments. In addition, bootleggers and gamblers brought increased crime as they flouted Prohibition. The police were reportedly apathetic at best. Most alarmingly, the Ku Klux Klan rose in power as many white Protestant Hoosiers turned their fears of crime, immigration, and increased diversity into an organized force for hate and discrimination.[9] But these forces did not go unchallenged.
When NAACP state president Katherine “Flossie” Bailey organized a Marion branch in 1918, Allen Temple Rev. W. C. Irvin signed on as a founding member.[10] Allen Temple clergy would continue to serve the NAACP at the state and local level throughout the church’s history. In September 1929, Bailey brought African American U.S. Representative Oscar DePriest to Allen Temple. Speaking to a large crowd of Black congregants and residents, DePriest called on the audience to vote and “to stand together.”[11] Again, Allen Temple was not unique as a civil rights organizational center. Black churches across the country served this role. Allen Temple was not even unique in Marion, as several other churches hosted civil rights rallies and speakers as well. But that does not make it less heroic.
“Oscar DePriest,” glass negative, 1929, National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress.
In September 1930, a white mob tore three Black teenagers, accused but not convicted of crimes against two white Marion residents, from the Marion jail. The mob then beat, mutilated, and lynched Tom Shipp and Abe Smith. The perpetrators left the young men’s bodies hanging as a message to Black residents that “they were at the mercy of white residents,” according to historian Nicole Poletika. The story of the 1930 Marion lynchings has been thoroughly and sensitively told elsewhere by other scholars, notably by James H. Madison in his 2001 monograph Lynching in the Heartland.[12] But understanding that Marion’s Black community was deeply wounded, shaken, and afraid for their lives is important to understanding the significance of the work that Marion’s Black churches accomplished in the shadow of the lynchings.
“Grant Sherriff’s Ousting Is Asked,” Indianapolis Star, August 21, 1930, 9, Newspapers.com.
In the face of this horror and fear, some local Black leaders still found the courage to speak out and call for action. Rev. Hillard D. Saunders, who had only recently been appointed pastor of Allen Temple, joined Bailey and others in demanding legal justice in the wake of the lynchings. They presented the Indiana governor with a petition calling for the removal of the sheriff who failed to protect Smith and Shipp. [13] While Bailey deserves the credit for ultimately leveraging the heinous crimes into anti-lynching legislation, the united support of the local NAACP leaders, Marion clergy, and the courage of every day Black residents demanded the attention of the Indiana General Assembly and governor. [14]
“John Campbell Dancy,” photograph, n.d., accessed Victoria W. Wolcott, “John Campbell Dancy Jr.,” January 19, 2007, BlackPast.org.
Allen Temple members and clergy continued to humbly push Marion towards greater inclusion and equality. In 1945, the church hosted John C. Dancy, executive secretary of Detroit Urban league.[15] Dancy had helped desegregate industrial businesses in Michigan, opening skilled positions to African Americans. He likely spoke to Marion residents on peaceful desegregation tactics.[16] By 1947, Allen Temple hosted regular meetings of the Marion Urban League, which was incorporated in 1942 with a much-needed mission of working “to secure equal Opportunities in all sectors of our society for Black and other minorities.”[17] In May 1949, Allen Temple pastor C. T. H. Watkins joined speakers from Marion College and the Indiana Jewish Community Relations Council at an “interracial fellowship dinner.”[18] By November 1949, the Marion Urban League boasted a membership of 350 African Americans, almost 15% of the city’s Black population.[19]
Yet Marion remained segregated. In 1954, the Marion Urban League and the local NAACP successfully worked to desegregate the public pool, a highly visible symbol of inequality in the city. White and Black Marion residents pushed for increased hiring of Black teachers and police officers throughout the 1950s and 60s, making small but regular gains.[20]
In 1961, A.M.E. leadership appointed the “dynamic” Rev. Dr. Ford Gibson to serve as pastor of Allen Temple. An Indianapolis native and former school teacher with a Ph.D. in sociology, Rev. Gibson had recently served as the president of the Indianapolis NAACP. In 1957 and 1958, Rev. Gibson led “the epic struggle for fair employment” at local supermarkets.[21] Unsurprisingly, when he arrived at Allen Temple, Rev. Gibson invested himself in the fight for greater equality in Marion.
In the summer of 1962, Rev. Gibson and Rev. B. A. Foley of Bethel AME led a campaign demanding an “immediate investigation and the removal” of Marion Postmaster Charles R. Kilgour.[22] The pastors charged that Kilgour, as president of the Francis Marion Hotel, which “allegedly refused to accommodate Negroes,” should be removed from his position as postmaster.[23] Foley and Gibson publicly called on U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to act. Rev. Gibson, who had also served as president of the Indiana chapter of the NAACP, addressed a crowd of 300 people at a mass meeting. According to the Indianapolis Recorder, the pastor stated that the Black residents of Marion “will not stop until segregation is dead and buried and never to rise again.”[24]
“Rev. Ford Gibson Re-Elected NAACP President for Year,” Indianapolis Recorder, December 27, 1958, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
While Kilgour kept his job, Rev. Gibson continued his calling. Rev. Gibson went on to serve the NAACP as the president of the Indiana Conference of Branches and president of Region 11, which included eight state organizations. He also joined the 1964 March on Washington and worked for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.[25] While Black Americans continued to make progress toward equality, Marion still had a long way to go.
By July 1969, the city was on edge. The Marion NAACP reported “continued police brutality, abuse, harassment and refusal to protect young black people in that city.”[26] White residents blamed local Black youth for a series of firebombings that destroyed a lumber company and country club.[27] The Marion NAACP reported “arrests of black victims of unprovoked assaults by white hoodlums and the holding of young black people in custody and refusal of bonds on illegal grounds.”[28] At the same time, the Marion city council approved the purchase of police dogs, threatening to further escalate violence.[29]
Charles Moore, “Civil Rights Demonstrations, Birmingham Protests,” photograph,1963, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed Smithsonian.
On July 19, the Indianapolis Recorder reported on the national NAACP convention where the organization addressed the escalating violence in Marion. Marion representatives reported that in only one week, seventy-five Black residents had been arrested by Marion police “in a fashion of harassment and intimidation.” Once jailed, authorities were demanding excessive bail bonds of up to $10,000. Most alarmingly, the Marion NAACP leadership, including local branch president Carlyle Gulliford, received death threats.[30]
“Marion NAACP Elects,” Indianapolis Recorder, February 25, 1956, 9, Hoosier State Chronicles. [Carlyle Gulliford pictured far right.]In response, NAACP president Roy Wilkins called on the state NAACP organizations of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and West Virginia to descend on Marion for “a seven-state mass protest rally” on July 20.[31] The NAACP published a list of demands for Marion officials, mainly attacking segregation and job discrimination. They demanded the city hire Black firemen, policemen, and officials and called out specific companies who would not hire African Americans, including the municipal phone and light companies. The NAACP also called for fair housing and mortgage practices and for an end to segregation in recreational facilities.[32]
An estimated 3,000 people marched in the name of these demands, including the congregants of Allen Temple. Long time member Pearl Bassett, who was also active in the Urban League and a leader within the state NAACP, remembered the march. She recalled, “We first had the walk from 26th Street to the courthouse for discrimination and equal opportunities for people and jobs. And it was a wonderful thing.”[33] Bassett told the Indianapolis Recorder, “It was so well organized and we accomplished what we set out to do.”[34] Black activists did change Marion, but it took a long time. The city’s civil rights progress trailed the nation and the state. In his book Lynching in the Heartland, Dr. James Madison presents convincing evidence that this stunting of equality was in large part a result of the lingering fear and trauma imposed on the community by the 1930 lynchings.[35]
But for centuries sacred Black spaces have served to heal some of this trauma. In these spaces, people of color can feel heard and process anxiety, engage in prayer and meditation, and become empowered through activism. Thus, these spaces are essential to creating positive change in all communities. By marking and preserving these spaces, we honor those people of color who sought refuge here throughout history- a moment to regain their strength in the face of oppression in order to continue fighting for civil rights. Each small, historically Black church across our state has a story to tell. The Indiana Historical Bureau and the friends and family of Weaver Settlement look forward to dedicating a new state historical marker in 2022 to tell the story of Allen Temple.
Notes:
[1] “Coping with Racial Trauma,” Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, psychology.uga.edu.
[2] Akilah Cadet, “Black Health Matters: Safe Spaces to Exist and Thrive,” January 29, 2021, Healthline, healthline.com; Safe Black Space, “Historical Perspective,” www.safeblackspace.org.
[3]Indiana Historical Bureau, Weaver Settlement State Historical Marker, in.gov/history.
[4] “Weaver,” Indianapolis Recorder, February 25, 1899, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Marion Flashes,” Indianapolis Recorder, September 15, 1900, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Marion Flashes,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 6, 1901, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Marion Flashes,” Indianapolis Recorder, November 16, 1901, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles; Asenath Peters Artis, “The Negro in Grant County,” 1909, in Centennial History of Grant County, 1812-1912, edited by Ronald L. Whitson (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1914), 348-57, accessed Archive.org. Church histories produced by Allen Temple report that the congregation first met in the home of local resident Turner Wallace. IHB was unable to confirm the claim with census or newspaper research. Noted local historian Aseneth Peters Artis reported in 1909 that the congregation then purchased the building at Washington and Thirty-Fifth Streets from a Protestant congregation in 1901. This would have to have occurred in the second half of the year as the Indianapolis Recorder reported in July 1901 that the congregation was looking to build a church. By November 1901, the Indianapolis Recorder reported that “the South Marion Mission held services in the Methodist Protestant Church on 35 street.” It still took the congregation some years to pay off the mortgage.
[6]“Marion Flashes,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 8, 1905, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Conference Meets,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 22, 1905, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Pastor of the 35th Street Church,” Marion News-Tribune, July 23, 1905, 7, microfilm, Marion Public Library; “Great Event,” Marion News-Tribune, July 24, 1905, 2, Marion and Grant County File, Marion Public Library.
[8] James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 32.
[9] Madison, 30-42.
[10] Marion Indiana Branch National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Application for Charter, Date of Organization Meeting: November 28, 1918, NAACP Founding Documents, Library of Congress, copy available in IHB’s Allen Temple marker file.
[11] “Marion Group to Escort DePriest,” Kokomo Tribune, September 7, 1929, 11, Newspapers.com; Madison, 60.
[12] Madison, passim.
[13] “A. M. E. Church Appointments Made Public,” Indianapolis Times, October 1, 1929, 16, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Grant Sherriff’s Ousting Is Asked,” Indianapolis Star, August 21, 1930, 9, Newspapers.com.
[14]Nicole Poletika, “Strange Fruit: The 1930 Marion Lynching and the Woman Who Tried to Prevent It,” Untold Indiana, May 15, 2018, blog.history.in.gov.
[15] Merle L. Thruston, “Marion, Ind.,” Indianapolis Recorder, February 24, 1945, 15, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[16] “John Campbell Dancy,” photograph, n.d., accessed Victoria W. Wolcott, “John Campbell Dancy Jr.,” January 19, 2007, BlackPast.org.
[17] “Urban League, Carver Center Hold Annual Meet at Marion,” Indianapolis Recorder, December 13, 1947, 9, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Marion Urban League Stages Campaign; Seeks 600 Members,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 7, 1949, 9, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[18] “Fellowship Meet Addressed by Local Cleric, at Marion,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 14, 1949, 9, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[19] “Marion Urban League Lauded at Meet: Work of Marion Urban League Wins Praise,” Indianapolis Recorder, November 12, 1949, 9, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[20] Madison, 130-138.
[21] “Hoosier Minister Gets Degree in California,” Indianapolis Recorder, August 25, 1951, 6, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Rev. Ford Gibson Re-Elected NAACP President for Year,” Indianapolis Recorder, December 27, 1958, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Ministerial Appointments Are Made at AME 123rd Meet,” Indianapolis Recorder, November 18, 1961, 9, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[22] “Marion Hotel Owner Under ‘Bias Fire:’ Ind. Postmaster Party to Charge of Jimcrowism,” Indianapolis Recorder, June 30, 1962, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[23] Ibid.
[24] “AME Minister Scores Racial Bias at Marion, Ind,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 7, 1962, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[25] “Dr. Ford Gibson Assumes New AME Church Post,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 6, 1968, 13, Hoosier State Chronicles; “Dr. Ford Gibson to Speak Sun. at Allen Chapel AME,” Indianapolis Recorder, January 11, 1969, 7, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[26] “NAACP Protests Racial Atrocities at Marion,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 5, 1969, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[27] “Riots Engulf Three Hoosier Cities,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 5, 1969, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[28]”NAACP Protests Racial Atrocities at Marion,” 1.
[29] Madison, 140.
[30] “Wilkins to Address Marion Rally,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 19, 1969, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[31] Ibid.
[32] “3000 Turnout for Marion Protest,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 26, 1969, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[33] Pearl Bassett, Oral History Interview, 2009, University of Southern Indiana, University Archives and Special Collections, David L. Rice Library, University of Southern Indiana.
[34] Annette L. Anderson, “NAACP Victorious Then and Now,” Indianapolis Recorder, July 10, 1993, 11.
Performers at The Famous Door, an Indianapolis club known for its drag shows, ca. 1975, accessed The Michael Bohr Collection of the Indy Pride Chris Gonzalez Library and Archives, courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society.
“In our endeavors to attain social justice, we cannot afford the destructive luxury of discriminating against one another.”
Justice, Inc., an LGBTQ+ rights organization, issued this statement in 1989 after some gay bars in Indianapolis refused to serve cross-dressing and transgender individuals.[1] The city’s queer community had already encountered and protested numerous challenges posed by law enforcement, including police harassment, surveillance of cruising sites, and possible prejudiced police work as homicide rates increased for gay men. Although gay bars afforded a degree of shelter from discrimination, not all were afforded the opportunity to patronize them.
While examining Indiana’s gay newsletter The Works, I came across recurring incidents of discrimination within Indianapolis’s queer population. In 1973, outspoken transgender rights activist Sylvia Rivera drew attention to these incidents on a national level at New York City’s Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally. Rivera had helped found the Gay Liberation Front and, with her friend Marsha P. Johnson, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in NYC, which provided desperately-needed shelter and food for homeless trans youth.
https://youtu.be/Jb-JIOWUw1o
In addition to advocating for people of color and the impoverished, Rivera advocated for white, middle-class men and women jailed because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. She also fought for the women’s liberation movement. Despite this, she was shunned for her attempts to include trans individuals in the broader gay rights movement. She famously addressed this ostracism after pushing her way on stage at the Liberation Day Rally. There, she passionately addressed the crowd, stating “I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way?” Her speech was met with a smattering of jeers and applause.
However, marginalized individuals within the queer community have been increasingly recognized through public artwork, Netflix documentaries, and seminars like The New Republic’s recent “Sex Workers as Queer History”. Cecilia Gentili, founder of Trans Equity Consulting and transgender actress in the Netflix show POSE, recalled in the seminar that gay men had significant power over transwomen and if you “weren’t fabulous enough” then you couldn’t get in the bar. She likened these experiences to the “criminalization of gender.” In this post, I examine similar incidents in Indianapolis, as well as strategies employed by the victims of discrimination to help secure rights for all.
Kerry Gean, dressed as the “woman I am deep inside of my biological male self,” and friends went to the Varsity Lounge in February 1989. After they were seated, their server singled out Gean with a request for identification. The server then informed her that she was breaking the law because the photo on her I.D. did not identically match her face. Humiliated and hurt, she returned home, changed into “male” clothes, and upon return was immediately served. After Gean’s experience, she asked readers in an editorial for The New Works News “Are we now turning against ourselves? Can we forget what it feels like to be barred from a public place by the owner, or even a bartender, who has some reason to hate us for the hard but true choices we have made?”[2]
Roberta Alyson, courtesy of The New Works News (August 1989): 1, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
By June, things were no better for Roberta Alyson, described by The Works as a “pre-operative transsexual.” Alyson was denied entrance to the gay bar Our Place on the grounds of not meeting dress code and identification not matching Alyson’s face, despite having a doctor’s note confirming the necessity of dressing as a woman. Bar officials got an off-duty officer who worked security to check the 31-year-old’s ID. He crumpled up the doctor’s note and Alyson “regrettably began to panic,” walking away from the parking lot. When the officer pursued and arrested Alyson, who later said one of the back-up officers was abusive and tried to lift Alyson’s skirt. Alyson was charged with and fined for fleeing an officer.[3]
Alyson addressed the implications of such discrimination in a letter to the editor of The New Works News, noting Our Place’s dress code “flies in the face of the Stonewall Riots and sends a terrifyingly repressive message to the ‘straight’ community.” Alyson noted, “There were ‘genetic females’ in the bar on the night I visited it” and asked “Am I somehow more of a ‘threat’ to the bar’s image than a woman born?” Reflecting Gentili’s recollection, Alyson wrote “We, the greater gay community, are seeing a disturbing trend in that ‘gay rights’ seem only to apply to gays and lesbians who ‘fit in.’” Simply put, “Gay rights are human rights, and they apply to all of us!”[4]
Indianapolis police liaison Shirley Purvitis, one of the first to be appointed in the nation, organized a meeting to try to resolve issues between “certain segments of the gay community” and local gay bars. These bars included Our Place, 501 Tavern, and The Varsity. She noted later that “one of the most effective ways to fight discrimination was to ‘shut up and listen to what the other person has to say.’” Bar Owners, members of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union and Justice, Inc., IPD vice officers, and members of the Indiana Crossdresser Society (IXE) attended the meeting, which was, “as expected, confrontational from beginning to end.”[5]
As to claims that individuals were being denied entrance due to discrepancies between their photo I.D. and their physical features, Excise Chief Okey stated that “the only requirement that excise has for a person being served alcohol is that they be 21 years of age or older. . . . crossdressing, either male or female, is not grounds for refusal of service.” Other bar owners stated blatantly that they refused to admit these patrons, not because they feared breaking excise laws, but because they intended to “‘preserve the established atmosphere of their bars.'”[6] A 501 Tavern spokesperson stated that these individuals “‘were not wanted there,’ and if they had been admitted violence might have resulted. The bar owners also voiced the fear that if they admitted people in drag their regular patrons might leave.” Gay TV producer Gregory McDaniel denounced this reasoning, stating, “‘What I’m hearing now is exactly what I heard 20 years ago when attempts were being made to keep blacks out of Riverside Park and other public places.'”[7] Aside from being morally wrong, McDaniel alleged this discrimination halted momentum in the broader fight for gay equality, noting, “The wire services have picked up these stories. This shows the dominate [sic] society that we are not unified and that they are safe in oppressing us.”
David Morse, manager of Our Place, stated at the meeting that he felt “‘very much trapped in the middle.’” He tried to reconcile the needs of both parties, “perhaps naively,” by establishing the dress code and I.D. policy. However, he noted that he “‘learned many lessons'” from the ensuing discussions. [8] Perhaps fear of losing the bars they fought so hard to establish—whether by mistakenly breaking excise laws or drawing unwanted attention to the establishment—owners implemented discriminatory policies. Unfortunately, the meeting to discuss these policies ended without much resolution.
Members of IXE, Courtesy of The New Works News (August 1989): 7, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
IXE met separately with Justice, Inc. to address the issue and one observer at the meeting speculated that “perhaps one reason that the crossdressers were causing such a stir in the ‘male’ bars” was because they looked:
‘too good and too much like natural, normal women and a far cry from the narrow gay-oriented perception of what “drag queens” look like. Perhaps some of the shakier ‘male’ egos couldn’t handle this unaccustomed image.’ [9]
By September, there seemed to be a bit more acceptance, as Our Place admitted Roberta Alyson, who by then had two pieces of “‘official’ feminine'” identification. The newsletter reported that Tomorrow’s and Jimmy’s had also been more welcoming.[10] McDaniel also commented that the The New Works News‘s extensive coverage of the discrimination showed that the community could be “introspective and self-correcting.”[11]
Sharon Allan, of IXE, decided to affect change by sitting down with bar employees. She met with Brothers manager Michael David to ask if their policy that identification had to match one’s appearance was implemented uniformly. After he said yes, Allan informed him that she “had been in the bar four times, after work and in a tie and had never been asked for ID.” Allan reported to the New Works News that “Michael immediately saw the lack of universality in their policy and promised to speak with the owner at the next staff meeting.”[12]
Capitalizing on the positive momentum, Justice, Inc. hosted the second “Discrimination Within the Gay Community” workshop in December.[13] While the turnout was low, and bar employees noticeably absent from the meeting, attendees reported that most bars had “reversed” their discriminatory policies. At the meeting, Gary Mercer, of Goshen, quipped “’Before you judge other people in the gay community, you better walk a mile in their pumps.’” Gay Cable Network’s Eric Evans agreed, noting that “‘discrimination is usually the result of ignorance.'” He suggested ongoing education for “both the gay and straight communities.” This, he said, could be accomplished through television programming and by forming a Gay Community Center.[14]
While awareness and dialog did not end prejudice entirely within Indy’s queer community, reported incidents diminished in The New Works News. Genny Beemyn notes in “Transgender History of the United States,” that in the early 1990s a “larger rights movement” emerged, “facilitated by the increasing use of the term ‘transgender’ to encompass all individuals whose gender identity or expression differs from the social norms of the gender assigned to them at birth.”[15] Still, activists fought an uphill battle for inclusion, as the “March on Washington” steering committee voted overwhelmingly to leave them out of the 1993 “Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation” march, despite support from bisexual allies.[16]
Rendering of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, courtesy of the New York State Parks, accessed timeout.com.
Discrimination and violence against transgender individuals, especially those of color, endures, although largely waged by those outside of the queer community. However, public recognition of those marginalized within the community has increased, to some extent. In 2019, New York City announced it would honor drag queens and transgender rights activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson with monuments. Scott W. Stern and Charles O’Malley noted in their 2019 “Remembering Stonewall as It Actually Was—and a Movement as It Really Is” that the decision:
reflects a dawning awareness (among those in positions of power) that the LGBTQ movement was always more diverse, more radical, and more closely connected with other social movements than is commonly believed.
Along with the statues of Rivera and Johnson, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in August 2020 that the Marsha P. Johnson State Park, located along the East River, would be dedicated. This will be the first state park in the US honoring an LGBTQ+ individual, as well as a transgender woman of color. Stern and O’Malley argue that we should examine and commemorate those at the margins of equal rights movements not simply for history’s sake, but because “More accurate renderings of the past inform the way we act in the future; they inform whose lives we prioritize in the present.”[17] That is why we should be aware of Roberta Alyson and Kerry Gean, whose determination to transform humiliating experiences into policy change helped open the door to acceptance for other transgendered and cross-dressing individuals in Indianapolis. They remind us of the importance in engaging in conversations with “the other.”
*The professional study of LGBTQ+ history is relatively new. We welcome feedback regarding accuracy and terminology, especially given the challenges in locating primary sources and the evolving conception of what comprises the queer community. We are especially interested in documenting lived experiences from a variety of perspectives.
[1] “Justice Investigation Calls for Uniform Bar Policies,” The New Works (October 1989): 8, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[3] “O.P.’s Dress Code Causes Arrest of TS: Transsexual Arrested Trying to Gain Admittance,” The New Works News (August 1989): 1, 7, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[4] Roberta Alyson, “Crossdresser’s Visit to Our Place,” The New Works News (July 1989): 3, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[5] “O.P.’s Dress Code Causes Arrest of TS: Transsexual Arrested Trying to Gain Admittance,” The New Works News (August 1989): 1, 7, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] “IXE Meets with Justice,” The New Works News (August 1989): 7, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[10] Gregory McDaniel, “Courageous Clear Thinking,” The New Works News (September 1989): 6, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[11] Ibid., 3.
[12] Sharon Allan, “No Discrimination Intended at Brothers,” The New Works News (October 1989): 3, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[13] “Justice Discrimination Workshop,” The New Works News (December 1989): 6, accessed Chris Gonzalez GLBT Archives, IUPUI Library.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Genny Beemyn, “Transgender History of the United States,” in Laura Erickson-Schroth, ed., Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 28, accessed umass.edu.
[16] Ibid., 29.
[17] Scott W. Stern and Charles O’Malley, “Remembering Stonewall as It Actually Was—and a Movement as It Really Is,” The New Republic (June 24, 2019), accessed newrepublic.com.
Every election elicits charges of voter fraud. During the 2016 general election, Republicans charged Democrats with importing out-of-state voters to swing New Hampshire. During the 2018 midterms, Democrats charged Republicans with disenfranchising African American senior citizens who needed rides to the polls. The courts can decide the individual cases, but the accusations show us that people have always been concerned about who is a legitimate voter, and therefore, citizen.
In 1880, the democratic newspaper of Lebanon, Boone County, published a ranting article accusing Republicans of voter fraud. The Lebanon Weekly Pioneer claimed that Republicans at the state level imported Black men from North Carolina to Boone County to win a legislative seat for the region. The charge was ludicrous. Black families had established a thriving farming community around Thorntown in the Sugar Creek Township of Boone County as early as the 1840s. But the article showed more than the prejudice of the local editor, who saw this community as “imported,” as “other,” and as not “real” or “true” Boone County voters. The article reflected the fear of the white, democratic newspaper’s audience. These white citizens were afraid of losing their sovereignty. Because whether or not the Pioneer considered Black Hoosiers to be “real” voters, the Black men of Boone County held real political power. [1]
By the 1840s, patriarch Moody Gilliam moved his large family, described as “mulatto” by white census takers, from North Carolina to Boone County, Indiana. Other members of the Gilliam family had been prominent in the establishment of nearby Roberts Settlement in Hamilton County. This proximity to family and another black community certainly played an important part in the decision to settle and farm in Boone. The Gilliams owned at least $1000.00 worth of property by 1850 which they farmed and improved successfully. By 1860, Moody Gilliam’s property was estimated at $4000.00. This would be approximately $120,000 today, a solid foundation for a family facing unimaginable prejudice and legal discrimination. [2]
Registration certificate issued in Gibson County, Indiana to Gilly Ann Perry, Indiana State Library, Nelson Perry Collection, accessed Indiana Historical Bureau.
Though he was a well-to-do land owner by 1860, Moody Gilliam would not have been allowed to vote. Additionally, he may have been forced to register with county authorities and to post a $500 bond with the assumption that the county would someday be supporting him. In fact, Indiana residents made it clear that they did not even want him there at all. In 1851, Hoosiers voted for Article XIII of the Indiana Constitution that stated, “No negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.” Despite racist legislation and prejudice, Black settlers established a successful farming community in Boone County concentrated in Sugar Creek Township near Thorntown.
By 1860, seventy-two Black Hoosiers lived in Sugar Creek Township with eleven based in Thorntown proper. The census from that year, shows us that they arrived mainly from North Carolina and Kentucky, that they were predominately farmers, and that most could not read and write. Many Black Southerners had been prohibited from obtaining an education as it was seen by white slave owners as a threat to the slavery system. The mainly illiterate founders of the Sugar Creek settlement, however, broke this systematic oppression by making sure their children could read and write.
By the late 1860s, Sugar Creek residents of color purchased land from local Quakers for the purpose of building a school, likely at the corner of Vine and Franklin Streets in Thorntown. Around the same time, they also purchased a lot to build an A.M.E. church at the west end of Bow Street. The church established a Sabbath school around 1869. Thus, the children Sugar Creek’s founders received a primary education as well as a spiritual one. By 1869, residents purchased more Quaker land to establish a “burying ground for the Colored people of Thorntown and vicinity.” It was clear that they planned on staying. [3]
Harper’s Weekly, March 18, 1865. Wood Engraving. Colonel Charles Fox Leading the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment into Charleston, S.C. when the City Surrenders to Union Forces on February 21, 1865 ,” accessed Black Past.
During the Civil War, at least one Sugar Creek son fought for the Union cause in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment of the United States Colored Troops. It’s not clear when Elijah Derricks came to Sugar Creek, before or after the war, but he is buried in the “colored cemetery.” Derricks volunteered for service in 1863 when he was 38-years-old. His regiment saw a great deal of action in Florida and South Carolina.
“Elijah Derricks,” 55th Massachusetts Infantry, Misc. Cards, 1864, compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers, accessed Fold3, Ancestry Library.
All Civil War units struggled with causalities from disease and Derricks suffered several bouts of illness, but returned to his regiment each time. In November 1864, he was injured at the Battle of Honey Hill, a Union initiative designed to help Sherman’s March to the Sea. It’s not clear if Derricks’ injury took him out of action or if he remained with the regiment until it mustered out. If he did remain, he would have been present in 1865 when the 55th marched into a conquered Charleston, arriving “to the shouts and cheers of newly freed women, men, and children.”[4] Either way, Derricks carried his injury for life, as he collected a pension for his injured arm back at Sugar Creek. [5]
By the late 1860s, the Sugar Creek community also boasted a Masonic lodge. By 1874, they had seventy-four members and the Boone County Directory listed the group as: Washington Lodge F&AM (Colored). While not much is known about “the colored Masons of Thorntown,” their establishment of such a society shows us that they sought power through organization. However, the men of Sugar Creek also took more direct political action. [6]
While the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave Black men in the North the right to vote in 1870, one newspaper article implied that some residents of color in Sugar Creek participated in local elections prior to this legislation. The Thorntown Argus reported in 1897 that after the well-liked and respected barber John Mitchell settled in Thorntown around 1864, “he was a delegate to the first Republican county convention held after his arrival and there were 47 colored voters in this township then”[7] The newspaper’s language is ambiguous, but seems to imply that they were voting in the 1860s before the amendment passed. [8]
James Sidney Hinton, 1880, Division of Manuscripts and Rare Books, Indiana State Library.
After officially gaining suffrage rights, however, the men of color in the community immediately joined the political efforts and causes of the time. On Saturday, August 10, 1870, they held a large “XVth Amendment celebration” at Thorntown. [9] One of the speakers that day was the James Sidney Hinton, a powerful orator and civil rights advocate who would become the first African American to serve in the Indiana General Assembly. There is no record of what the Republican leader said to the people of Thorntown the day they celebrated their enfranchisement. However, gleaning from a speech he made some years later on Independence Day, we can imagine he made similar remarks. Hinton stated on that occasion: “The forces of truth and the principles of liberty, born in the days of the revolution, and proclaimed in the Declaration of 1776 have placed the negro for the first time in his history on this continent in a position to realize that he is a man and an American citizen.” [10]
In 1872, several prominent men of the Sugar Creek community founded a political organization. The Lebanon Patriot reported that “the colored men of Thorntown were organized into a Grant club at Thorntown” which hosted political speakers. [11] The Crawfordsville newspaper referred to it as the “Gran Wilson Club,” making clear that they were advocating for the Republican presidential ticket during the election season. [12] Despite the more blatantly racist policies of the Democratic Party at the time, not all Black residents of Sugar Creek were Republicans. In 1896, “Rev. Charley Derrickson of Thorntown, colored, 90 years of age, took part in several Bryan parades during the campaign.” [13] While this three time presidential candidate was never an advocate for Black citizens, perhaps the reverend found something he liked in William Jennings Bryan’s Protestant values.
By the late 1870s, local newspapers provided evidence of the power of the Black vote in the area. The Lebanon Pioneer described (and poked fun at) the candidates for local offices of Sherriff, County Recorder, and County Auditor. The newspaper implied that the candidates were Quakers and noted that only one of the candidates by the last name of Thistlethwait could “hold a solid negro vote.” The support of the Black vote, the newspaper concluded, was needed for Thistlethwait to win the election and was only possible for him if local resident of color, Harvey White, “sticks to him.” [14] The Pioneer was staunchly Democrat and often blatantly racist, so it is quite possible that these statements were meant to discredit the candidate. However, it does show the weight of Black leadership and suffrage in the district.
This increased influence of the Black vote was due in part to an increase in population. By 1870, 172 Black Hoosiers lived in Sugar Creek Township, seventy-seven of whom lived in Thorntown. The A.M.E. church had twenty-five adult congregants by 1874 and forty-five children in Sunday school. In 1879, the local newspaper reported that “Elias Schadd, colored, was impaneled as a petit juryman from Sugar Creek Township last Monday, to serve on the present term of court. He is the first colored man ever placed on the petit jury in Boone County.” [15] Thorntown was growing and changing, and for some white residents, this felt threatening.
Lebanon Pioneer, November 27, 1879, 3, NewspaperArchive.com
In nearby Whitestown, Boone County, white residents carried out “an unprovoked attack on a colored family.” According to the Lebanon Patriot, the family arrived on Thursday January 29, 1880, and “took refuge in an old dwelling house.” A mob surrounded the house the following evening and “showered the building with stones and brick-bats.” When the family was forced out of the structure, one of the children was “seriously injured” by a brick. The mob successfully “forced the family to leave town.” The Patriot reported that the attack was instigated by reports that Republicans were importing voters to Boone County. The paper dismissed the charges against republicans, stating that the patriarch of the unnamed family “had gone there of his own notion” and “the attack was wholly unwarranted.” [16]
The Democratic paper, the Lebanon Pioneer, attacked the Lebanon Patriot’s report of the incident with racist vitriol and slurs. The Pioneer reported that the Black man’s name was “Thusa” and that a white resident named “Mr. Scovill” lent him a stove and asked him several questions. The Pioneer reported on their supposed exchange. Thusa “said he had come from North Carolina, and that he had come to vote with the ‘publican party.’” Scovill asked him if he had any money or clothes to which he reportedly replied “no, sah.” The paper concluded, “He was a pauper, and imported as such, and the only reason he could give, was to vote the ‘publican’ ticket.” The newspaper claimed Whitestown was fed up with supporting such paupers and played down the physical attack, claiming the mob threw stones only at the house, and never mentioned the man’s wife or children. The Pioneer claimed the attack continued “until the colored occupant became so frightened as he agreed to leave the town . . . no one was hit or hurt.” [17]
Lebanon Weekly Pioneer, February 5, 1880, 2, accessed NewspaperArchive.com
In the same issue, the Lebanon Pioneer, printed a more extensive article charging Indiana Republicans with importing Black voters from North Carolina. Their entire argument hinged on the claim that if these Black settlers were coming of their own volition, they would never come to Boone County, Indiana. The paper asked:
If it is not for political purposes why do they come so far? Why don’t they stop in Pennsylvania or Ohio? And if the colored people are so anxious to come to Indiana, why don’t they come from Kentucky or Missouri. At least a few.
The Pioneer‘s argument was baseless. Of course, many people came from North Carolina, because they were joining family who came from North Carolina – a migration pattern that has existed for as long as migration has been recorded. And they did come from other states, especially Kentucky. In fact, about half of the residents of Sugar Creek were originally from the neighboring Blue Grass State. And some did come from Virginia and even New York.
Nonetheless the Pioneer stated:
It is a fact: they have brought them to Boone county. Republican leaders are doing it for the purpose of making sure of the county ticket and send a Republican to the legislature.
The paper concluded that these “stupid paupers” would “override the majority of real and true Indianians.” First of all, any true “Indianian” would have used the word “Hoosiers.” [18] Second, and all joking aside, there were few paupers or criminals among the Sugar Creek community. There were instead farmers, washer women, school teachers, reverends, barbers, ditch diggers, students, and veterans. [19] And despite all of the institutionalized prejudice, and against the odds, for many generations they created a healthy community in Sugar Creek, Boone County.
By the late 1890s, many of the Sugar Creek community had moved to Lebanon or surrounding towns for more employment opportunities. However, the Thorntown church stayed active for several more decades. In 1894, the Thorntown Argus reported that “the colored church” would serve as the polling place for the second precinct of Sugar Creek Township. [20] In 1898, the congregation raised money and built a brick parsonage building to house their reverend in comfort. In 1902, they held a successful New Year’s concert and fundraiser. That year, the Indianapolis Recorder reported on the “good work” of the Literary Society and Sunday school and noted that the women of the AME congregation organized a Missionary Society. [21] Unfortunately, there are few records of the lives of the women of Sugar Creek. Census records show that many had large families and thus were mainly engaged in child care, as well as helping with the farm. Thus, the work of the missionary society is perhaps our best insight into the lives of the women of Sugar Creek. These women organized programs and social gatherings at the church and engaged in community service. They raised money for a new carpet for the church. The ladies held “a successful social” after the organized theological debate held at the church and their programs were known for being “excellent” even forty miles away in Indianapolis. They led the memorial services for one congregate in which they were “assisted” by the revered, as opposed to the other way around. [22]
Today, the only known physical remnant of the Sugar Creek Community is the small cemetery where the Civil War veteran Elijah Derricks is buried under a worn headstone. This is all the more reason to continue looking into this story. There is more here – to add, correct, and uncover. Thorntown librarians, genealogists and Eagle Scouts have been working to learn more, and the descendants of Roberts Settlement have shown that genealogical research can open up a whole new world of stories. [See related local projects] But even with what little we do know about Thorntown and Sugar Creek, the community stands as a powerful reminder to check prejudice against newcomers. Before they could vote, or testify in court, or expect a fair shot, Black settlers built a thriving community in Sugar Creek. They worked, raised families, built a school, celebrated their accomplishments, worshiped together, and perhaps most importantly, they cast their ballots.
*Note on Terminology: The term “Black” is used here as opposed to “African American” because it provides the necessary ambiguity to describe the Sugar Creek settlers. Some family names at Sugar Creek are the same as residents of Roberts Settlement and thus likely relatives. Many Roberts residents either had no African heritage or very distant and thus did not identity as “African American.” Describing the Sugar Creek settlers as “Black” is more inclusive of the possibility that Sugar Creek residents had the same heritage as Roberts residents.
Notes
[1] Lebanon Weekly Pioneer, February 5, 1880.
[2] 1850 and 1860 United States Census accessed AncestryLibrary.
[3] Deed Record Book 15, Records of Boone County Recorder’s Office.
[4] Ephrem Yared, “55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment,” Black Past, March 15, 2016, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/55th-massachusetts-infantry-regiment-1863-1865/
[5] Lebanon Weekly Pioneer, October 11, 1883.
[6] Crawfordsville Weekly Journal, July 9, 1868.
[7] Thorntown Argus, March 6, 1897
[8] More on the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and Hoosier response: Indiana Historical Bureau [9] Lebanon Patriot, September 15, 1870. [10] “James Sidney Hinton,” accessed Indiana Historical Bureau.
[11] Lebanon Patriot, August 8, 1872.
[12] Crawfordsville Weekly Journal, August 15, 1872, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[13] Indianapolis Sun, November 3, 1896.
[14] Lebanon Pioneer, July 19, 1877.
[15] Lebanon Pioneer, November 27, 1879.
[16] Lebanon Weekly Pioneer, February 5, 1880.
[17] Lebanon Weekly Pioneer, February 5, 1880.
[18] Lindsey Beckley, “The Word ‘Hoosier:’ An Origin Story,” Transcript for Talking Hoosier History, Indiana Historical Bureau. [19] 1850 and 1860 United States Census accessed AncestryLibrary.
[20] Thorntown Argus, November 3, 1894.
[21] Indianapolis Recorder, April 19, 1902, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles.
[22] Indianapolis Recorder, April 19, 22, May 3, 17, 1902, Hoosier State Chronicles.
Further Reading
Anna-Lisa Cox, The Bone and Sinew of the Land (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).
Warren Eugene Mitleer Jr., The Complications of Liberty: Free People of Color in North Carolina from the Colonial Period through Reconstruction, Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carolina Digital Repository, accessed cdr.lib.unc.edu.
Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before 1900 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1985).
Stephen A. Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
On the corner of Sixth Avenue and Washington Street stands a complex forged out of Indiana limestone. Plants creep through shattered windows, “UR MOM” is spray-painted across a balcony, and the scorched roof opens up into the heavens. The remains of Gary’s City Church represent very different things to onlookers. For some, they symbolize the unfulfilled promise of industrial utopia. For others like Olon Dotson, professor of Architecture and Planning at Ball State University and a Ph.D. candidate in Purdue University’s American Studies Program, “The remains of the structure serve as a monument to racism and segregation.” For most, it is simply the backdrop for a scene in Transformers 3. Few would disagree, however, that City Church embodies the rise and fall of Steel City.
The church’s history is as nuanced as the feelings its remains inspire. The First Methodist Episcopal Church of Gary, was established in 1906, the same year the United States Steel Corporation gave birth to the city. The company converted acres of swampland and sand dunes, and soon Gary—named after U.S. Steel founding chairman Elbert Henry Gary—found itself dominated by steel mills. The expanding market for steel shaped the city’s built environment andencouraged population growth there. Between 1906 and 1930, increasing numbers of European immigrants, Black Southerners, Mexicans, and white migrants flocked to the region looking for work in the steel industry.
Historian James B. Lane contended that “Because of U.S. Steel’s limited concept of town planning, two strikingly different Gary’s emerged: one neat and scenic, the other chaotic and squalid.” Businessmen, as well as skilled plant operators and managers, settled North of the Wabash Railroad tracks. They resided in Gary Land Company’s subdivisions among paved streets, quaint homes, and lush rows of trees. Northsiders relaxed in limestone restaurants and club rooms after a long day of work. The cost to live in this area precluded many newcomers, primarily African Americans and immigrants, from settling there. They instead lived on the Southside, often in tarpaper shacks, tents, and barracks that lacked ventilation. Lane noted that because the Gary Land Company largely neglected this area, landlords “took advantage of the housing shortage and absence of health regulations or building codes by charging inflated rents and selling property under fraudulent liens.” This marshy region, deemed the “Patch,” attracted “mosquitos, and the pestilential outhouses, unpaved alleys, damp cellars, and overcrowded dwellings were breeding grounds for typhoid, malaria, and tuberculosis.”
Polish children by settlement houses, Gary, Indiana, ca. 1915, Joan Hostetler Collection, accessed The Indiana Album.
Lane noted that immigrant families on the Southside organized into “shanty” communities, where they “stuck together but adjusted their old-world lifestyles to new circumstances.” Sometimes various ethnic and racial groups socialized, and even learned from one another, as Black residents taught immigrants English and vice versa. Lacking access to the opportunities and amenities of the Northside, rampant crime and vice arose as “laborers entered the omnipresent bars armed and ready to squeeze a few hours of action into their grim lives.” Segregated from its inception, Gary’s social construction ultimately resulted in its implosion.
Reverend William Seaman, accessed Flikr. This image also appears in The Gary Post-Tribune, October 1, 1926, 9.
In the burgeoning metropolis, the aforementioned First Methodist congregation met in local schools, businesses, and an abandoned factory before constructing a church on the corner of Adams Street and Seventh Avenue in 1912. With rapid socioeconomic and demographic change taking place in Gary, the church, under the vision of white pastor William Grant Seaman, initiated plans in 1917 to move into the heart of the city. A native of Wakarusa, Indiana, Seaman earned his B.A. from DePauw University and his Ph.D. from Boston University. After ministering and teaching in various states, the pragmatic pastor relocated to Steel City in 1916 at the request of Chicago Bishop Thomas Nicholson.
Seaman, nicknamed “Sunny Jim” for his disposition, contended that Gary’s Methodist church had an obligation to ease the challenges faced by the:
industrial worker . . . often suffering injustice;
the foreigners within our boundaries . . . They represent some fifty different race and language groups;
our brothers in black, coming from the Southland in a continuous stream;
our own white Americans, who come in large numbers from the village and the farm.
He noted that this ministry was especially important, given that many urban churches had relocated to Gary’s outskirts as the city grew more congested. According to historian James W. Lewis, Reverend Seaman felt “the modern city was plagued by a breakdown of traditional community and social control, resulting in an anonymous, mobile, materialistic, hedonistic population.” He therefore believed that it was the church’s responsibility “to develop programs which would provide some of the support, guidance, and satisfaction characteristic of traditional communities.”
Compassionate and industrious, Seaman felt called to meet the “religious and creature-comfort need[s]” of the laborers and their families who poured “in great human streams through the gates of these mills.” However, his beliefs about the city’s newcomers, particularly the African American population, are problematic by today’s standards. He felt that white church leaders were best qualified to uplift the growing Black population, writing in 1920 that “colored people are very ignorant, and to a surprising degree morally undeveloped, and this fact is true of a very large number of their preachers.” Seaman justified the need for white leadership by citing rumors that Black-led denominations “are cultivating in their people a sense of being wronged.” Like Gary’s Stewart Settlement House (on which he served as a board member), Seaman’s intentions seem two-fold: to implement social control in a diversifying city and to provide humanitarian aid.
Lewis noted of Seaman and other white leaders:
Although their perception of the cause was often flawed and their service of it often mixed with other motives, their actions revealed their conviction that the church should be a prominent force for good, even in the modern city.
While Seaman held a paternalistic view of the Black community, his efforts to combat racism drew the ire of the Ku Klux Klan. Seaman opposed showing the film Birth of aNation, which reinforced stereotypes about the supposed inherent savagery of African Americans. He also tried unsuccessfully to convince the Methodist Hospital to admit Black patients.
Top: Construction of City Methodist Church; (L) ceremony to lay the church cornerstone (R) Bishop Frederick D. Leete speaking at ceremony (Rev. Seaman sits in light hat), 1925, accessed DePauw University Archives.
The ambitious pastor quickly got to work, meeting with leaders of the Centenary of Methodist Missions and the U.S. Steel Corporation to drum up support for a downtown church. His lobbying paid off and both groups donated approximately $350,000 to build an “oasis” that would be open seven days a week. In October 1926, Seaman’s vision was realized when City Church—as the First Methodist Episcopal’s downtown church came to be called—opened to much fanfare. Reporters marveled at the ornate cathedral, which boasted of a social-educational unit, gymnasium, rooftop garden, tennis court, and community hall equipped with a “moving picture outfit” and modern stage. It also contained retail stores and a commercial cafeteria, which generated income for church expenses. This was necessary, Seaman said, because the downtown church ministered to groups having fewer resources with which to support the sanctuary.
Although Sunny Jim sought inclusivity, records indicate that the congregation remained white until the church’s closing. Conspicuously absent from photographs of pews lined with worshippers—hair bobbed and suits pressed—were members of color. While Black residents did not bow their heads in prayer beside white congregants (who likely did not welcome their presence), they did utilize City Church’s amenities. According to Lewis, Seaman was fairly successful in promoting the community hall “‘as a religiously neutral ground for artistic and civic events,’” although “there was little mixing of cultures.”
Basketball game at City Church, no date, accessed DePauw University Libraries, Digital Library.
City Church tried to navigate race relations in a polarized city, to some degree, opening its doors to civic, social, and spiritual gatherings. In 1927, the church hosted a race relations service, in which members and pastors of African American churches Trinity M. E. and First Baptist shared in services. Reverend Seaman delivered the principle address, stating “We shall make no progress toward race union . . . until we view each other as God views us, children of the same Father and brothers all.” After toiling in factories, Swedes, Mexicans, and Croatians gathered at City Church to study, worship, and play. Romanian children, “Americanized” at schools like Froebel, congregated in the church gym to socialize and shoot hoops.
Production at City Church, courtesy of DePauw University Archives, accessed Opacity.
When Reverend Seaman left in 1929 under unclear circumstances, the church turned inward and ministered less frequently to Gary’s immigrant and Black populations, especially during the demanding years of the Great Depression and World War II. Unfortunately, Gary’s Negro YMCA closed and African Americans were the first to be let go at the mills, making churches and relief organizations more crucial than ever. Resentment built among Gary residents as they competed for government support, resulting in the voluntary and forced repatriation of Mexican workers on relief rolls. The church did offer programs where weary (likely white) residents could momentarily forget their troubles, hosting Gary Civic Theater plays and an opera by a renowned singer.
Church records from the early Atomic Era denote renewed interest in ministering to the church’s diverse neighbors. The degree to which the church took action is unclear, although advertisements for Race Relations Sunday indicate some walking of the talk.* City Church photographs document an immunization clinic, which served both African American and white children, as well as cooking classes for Spanish girls. It is clear, however, that, despite the efforts of some City Church pastors, members of the white congregation largely did not support, and sometimes opposed, integrated Sunday mornings. With Steel City’s influx of African Americans and immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, Gary’s white population fled to the suburbs, depleting the urban core of tax revenue. City Church members belonged to this exodus. Tellingly, on a 1964 survey, Rev. Allen D. Byrne appears to have checked, only to erase, a box noting that the church ministered to racial groups.
Immunization Clinic hosted by City Church, no date, courtesy of Calumet Regional Archives.
This changed temporarily with the leadership of Reverend S. Walton Cole, who perhaps came closest to fulfilling Reverend Seaman’s mission, with his 1964 appointment. Cole wrote frequently in City Church’s newsletter, Tower Talk, about confronting one’s personal prejudices and the role of the church in integrating minority groups. Unafraid to confront social issues, Cole argued at a Methodist Federation meeting, “We are not socialists and communists when we talk about moral problems in our nation. Wouldn’t Jesus talk about poverty if he walked among us today?” Under Cole’s pastorship, the church hired Aurora Del Pozo to work with Gary’s Spanish-speaking population. Such efforts, Tower Talk reported, went a long way in understanding their Hispanic neighbors, noting “we were introduced to the viewpoints and attitudes held by these Spanish speaking people that were a surprise to most of us.”
Cole, addressing the trend of church members to “shut their ears and eyes” and move out of the city, noted in 1966:
Hate is the strongest of all. We hate the Negroes, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexicans, the Irish, the English, the Germans, the French. We hate the Jews, the Catholics, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Socialists. We hate everybody, including ourselves. This is the way of the world, the secular world.
He countered that the Christian way centered around demonstrating love and hope for all. The NAACP awarded Reverend Cole with the first Roy Wilkins award for his work in civil rights. During his pastorship, the church worked to redevelop the downtown area, striving to “maintain a peaceful and developing community by improving race relations.” But this same year, fugitive James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, setting off a string of riots across the country. Riots in Gary’s Midtown section, formerly the Patch, that summer resulted in gunfire, looting, and burning. Gary’s first African American mayor, Richard Hatcher, contended “‘slum conditions in the city and inequalities in education and employment have fostered the tenseness'” that led to the riots.
Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher (arms crossed) and Reverend Jesse Jackson (at the podium) at a press conference for the National Black Political Convention, March 11, 1972, AP/Charles Knoblock, accessed Belt Magazine.
Some of Gary’s African American residents got involved in the Black Power Movement, which arose after decades of educational, political, and housing discrimination. The movement espoused racial pride, social equality, and political representation through artistic expression and social (and sometimes violent) protest. In 1972, Gary hosted the National Black Political Convention, which drew over 10,000 Americans of color. State delegates and attendees—comprised of Black Panthers, Socialists, Democrats, Republicans, and Nationalists—hoped to craft a cohesive political strategy to advance Black civil rights. This event highlighted Gary’s polarization along racial lines, which became so profound that City Church reported in the 1970s: “Evening sessions are difficult without police protection. Most folks are afraid to come downtown.” This schism was perhaps inevitable, given that city planners constructed Gary around the color of residents’ skin. As City Church membership sharply declined, church leaders realized they needed to build meaningful relationships with the local community.
It became apparent they had waited too long. The 1973 Pastor’s Report to the Administrative Board noted:
Most residents in the immediate area will already have found a convenient church where they are welcome . . . Furthermore Blacks are not likely to come to a church which they ‘feel’ has excluded them for several years. The neighborhood may have continued to change from one social class group to another, so that there is an almost unbridgeable gap between the white congregation and the persons living in the community.
A survey of urban church leaders cautioned in 1966 that, regardless of resources or mission, a white church in a Black neighborhood could only carry on for so long, that the “ultimate end is the same. THE CHURCH DIES!” City Church leaders considered merging with a local Black church, but when community interviews revealed that minority groups did not trust the church, leaders decided to close in 1975. Die it DID.
After decades of decomposition, philanthropic organizations and city leaders have turned their attention to redeveloping the building. After all, as Professor Dotson warns, Gary is in jeopardy of the “eminent collapse under the weight of its own history.” As of now, the most likely outcome involves stabilizing the building and converting it into a ruins garden. A supporter of the ruins concept, Knight Foundation’s Lilly Weinberg, seemingly invokes Reverend Seaman with her statement that “Creating spaces for Gary’s residents to meet and connect across backgrounds and income levels is essential to community building.” Some in Gary oppose this plan, arguing that if the city receives funding it should be allocated to existing African American churches that need structural support, rather than one that ultimately abandoned the Black community.
Regardless of City Church’s fate, Ball State Professor Olon Dotson argues it is crucial that Gary’s legacy of segregation is incorporated into its story “for the sake of the young children, attending 21st Century Charter School at Gary, who look out their classroom windows, or wait for their parents every day, in front of the abandoned ruins of a church, in the midst of abandoned Fourth World space.” If the ruins embody Gary’s past, what is done with them now could signify Steel City’s future.
For a list of sources used and historical marker text for City Church, click here.
* Without the digitization of Gary newspapers, and given the lack of documentation of Gary’s Black residents during the period, it is difficult to give voice to those City Church attempted to reach. Pastor Floyd Blake noted in 1973 that the church conducted over 100 interviews with Black, white, and Spanish-speaking residents regarding their perception of City Church. Although we have been unable to uncover them, they could provide great insight. Please contact npoletika@library.in.gov if you are aware of their location.
