Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/817

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INDIANA


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INDIANA


without railroads. The manufacturing interests of the State are considerable; in 1905 there were 7,912 factories representing an investment of $311,526,000, with 154,174 wage-earners. The value of their prod- uct was .$394,105,838, and the wages paid were $72,178,2.59. The bituminous coal output in 1907 was 13,2.50,715 tons; from its oil wells were produced 5,103,297 barrels of oil valued at .$4,489,213; of oolitic limestone the product value was $3,673,965.

Education. — According to latest estimates the total value of school property (public and religious) is $33,792,339; number of teachers, 16, .571; of pupils enrolled, 531,731. The public school fund of the State (including university fund) is $11,818,433. The State university is located at Bloomington, established according to the declaration of the first State constitution, and was opened in 1824. Presi- dent Hall, a Princeton graduate, constituted at that time the whole faculty. It has many large buildings, a faculty numljering seventy-two, and about 1800 stu- dents, of whom over one-third are young ladies. Pur- due University at Lafayette owes its name to John Purdue, a wealthy bachelor of that city, who en- dowed it as an agricultural college. It was founded by State legislative enactment in 1874 as Indiana's land-grant college, under the congressional act of 1862, when 13,000,000 acres of government land were set aside for establishing industrial colleges to ad- vance agriculture and the mechanical arts. It is one of sixty-five similar institutions founded in the United States. It has over 2100 students, 237 professors, some twenty-five substantial buildings, and a large U. S. experimental station. The campus and experimental farm cover ISO acres. Although supported liy legislative appropriations it is over- taxed for room and facilities. Coeducation prevails at Purdue and the State university, and in other State educational institutions. It is estimated that in 1907 Purdue gave in.struction to more than 100,000 people by its regular course, its short course in agri- culture, its farmers' institutes, and by its corn and fruit excursion trains with its professors and in- structors accompanying the trains.

The puljlic free school system of the State is now developed to a degree commensurate with the needs of the population. This development had its impetus from the spirit which dictated the constitution of 1852. Previous to that period, free pulilic education was scattered and meagre. A system of consolidating poorly-attended schools into one central school of greater efficiency and the free transportation of pupils (made possible by the law of 1907) are doing much in rural districts to lift education to a higher plane. Local township taxation has been liberal in advancing this system. No small factor in raising the level of rural intelligence, moreover, has been the extensive spread of the system of rural free mail delivery, providing a daily mail, with daily newspapers and periodicals. The State is also well supplied with rural telephone systems and good roads.

Institutions worthy of mention are Wabash Col- lege at Crawfordsville, a Presbyterian school with 231 students; Earlham College, near Richmond, with 413 students, founded by the Society of Friends; Franklin College at Franklin, a Baptist institution; De Pauw University at Greencastle, under Methodist influence, with 924 students; Taylor University at Upland; Butler University (near Indianapolis), founded by the Church of the Disciples, 256 students; Rose Polytechnic at Terre Haute, where also is the State normal school; Hanover College, founded in 1827 by Presbyterians, near Madison, with 13S stu- dents; Chautauqua classes at Winona Lake, and its technical institution at Indianapolis; Culver Military School at Lake Maxinkuckee (the largest of its kind in the U. S.); the normal school at Valparaiso, with 4000 students, the Indiana Kindergarten Training


Se.\l of Indiana


School at Indianapolis; manual training and do- mestic instruction have been instituted by about seventy-five towns; there are also State schools for blind, deaf and dumb, feeble-minded, and soldiers' orphans, where industrial training is also carried on.

History records that the first known regular school in the State was that of the Catholic priest Rivet at Vincennes (1793). Three years later there is an account of a little school in Dearborn County. As settlers came into the south-eastern counties children were taught in their homes. Owing to dangers from Indians and wild beasts, the teacher went to the homes, spending one-third of the day there. Thus with six families a teacher gave three lessons each week to all the children. Later, as danger of going through the forest decreased, the children congregated at the home of a centrally-located family, where a lean-to was built for their use against the pioneer's cabin. When pos- sible a log house near some living spring woukl be built and a teacher hired for three or more months, and " boarded around" with the patrons. It is a matter of history that some of the early log school houses in Washington Coun- ty were construct- ed with 1 o o p - holes for shooting at Indians. Barns and mills were often utilized. At Vevay (a Swi.ss settlement) the first school taught in English was in a horse mill.

In many southern counties after the Indian wars, block-houses were turned into schools. The interiors were of the crudest character. Adventurers from England, Scotland and Ireland, or the East, were generally the teachers in these primitive days. Many of them, to increase their earnings, chopped wood after school and on Saturdays. In these days there were no regular school books. Any accessible book — the Bible, Gulliver's Travels, or Pilgrim's Progress — was used to teach pupils to read. Ink and paper were almost as scarce. But as time went on, with the advance of civilization, these primitive condi- tions, so common to all the States west of the Alle- ghenies at some time in their history, were replaced by larger facilities, with better teachers and a fuller supply of books. But this may be taken as a true picture of pioneer days previous to (if not for a decade after) the adoption of the constitution in 1816. Struggles against the forces of nature, the sparseness and poverty of the population, made education in a general way a secondary matter. It was out of this condition that was evolved the theory and the system of free schooling in the rudiments at public expense.

History. — Indiana was originally part of the French possessions extending to the Gulf of Mexico. It was first visited in the latter part of the seventeenth century by hunters and Indian traders from Canada, and government posts were extended in the early years of the eighteenth century down the Wabash as far as Vincennes. Indian and French interests never clashed, but their settlements were of little historical moment. The Miami confederacy of Indians, who.se villages were scattered through the central and north- ern parts of the State, included the Weas, Foxes, Piankishaws, Pottawottomies, Shawanos, Ouiatenons, and Kickapoos. In 1763 the territory embraced by the State was ceded to England. At the time of the cession to Great Britain of the north-west territory