USA > Indiana > Marion County > Indianapolis > History of Indianapolis and Marion County, Indiana > Part 23
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1st. The Legislature, having been repeatedly so- licited by petitions and memorials to make some provision for the insane, deaf and dumb, and blind of the State, in 1839 addressed Congress on the
subject of a grant to assist in making sueli a pro- vision. This was never done, and there was no good reason why it should have been done or should have been asked. On the 31st of January, 1842, Gover- nor Bigger was ordered by the Legislature to eorre- spond with the Governors of other States and the officers of like institutions and ascertain the cost and modes of construction and management of insane hospitals, and on the 13th of February, 1843, was ordered to obtain plans to be submitted to the next Legislature. This was done, with the effect of se- curing a tax of one cent on one hundred dollars to create a building fund for an insane hospital here. This was the 15th of January, 1844. On the 13th of January, 1845, Dr. John Evans, Dr. L. Dunlap, and James Blake were appointed commissioners to select a site of not exceeding two hundred acres. They chose Mount Jackson, then the home of the Indiana poetess, Mrs. Sarah T. Bolton, and her hus- band, the first editor in Indianapolis or the New Pur- chase. They reported the selection with a building plan to the Legislature the following session of 1845- 46, and on the 19th of January, 1846, they were ordered to begin work on the building, and to sell Hospital Square 22, and apply the proceeds, with fifteen thousand dollars from the State treasury, to the work. The central building was begun the same year and finished in 1847, at a cost of seventy-five thousand dollars. The south wing was added in 1853-56, and the north wing in 1866-69. A great many minor changes and additions have been made at one time or another. The frontage is six hundred and twenty-four feet. The centre building is five stories high, including a basement and top half-story. A belvidere on the centre building is one hundred and three feet above the ground. The wings are three and four stories high. The third floor of the build- ing in the rear of the centre is used as a chapel, with a seating capacity of three hundred. The other two stories are used by the employés as kitchen and dining-room, steward's office, sewing-rooms, and the like. In the rear of this building is the engine building, with pumps and heating pipes and other necessary apparatus. A sewage system discharges into Eagle Creek. Water is supplied by a system of
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water-works on the Holly plan, like that of the city, with ample protection by fire-plugs and hose against fire. The whole structure is lighted with gas. It can accommodate six hundred or more patients at a time, with the necessary attendants. The superin- dents have been, in order of succession, Dr. John Evans, Dr. R. J. Patterson, Dr. James S. Athon, Dr. James H. Woodburn, Dr. Wilson Loekhart, Dr. Orpheus Everts, Dr. Rogers, and Dr. William B. Fletcher. The last has very recently introduced the system of intelligent restraint and kind treatment in place of manaeles and strait-waistcoats, with, so far, decided success. A few years ago the Legisla- ture concluded to make additional provision for the insane, who could not be accommodated in the old building, and ordered a new one, directly north of the old one, on a plan furnished by the late Edwin May, architeet of the new State-House. It was two or three years in building, and has but recently been finished. It is used mainly or wholly for female pa- tients, and will accommodate suitably some seven or eight hundred. The frontage is about eleven hundred feet, with a centre building and three wings on each side of it, each one retiring some feet back from the line of the other, making the front a series of steps. It is nearly three hundred fcet through the centre to the line joining the rear of the extreme wings. Within the year sites have been selected by commissioners for asylums for the incurably insane, for whom hitherto no provision has been made, though warmly urged by Governor Baker ten years ago. There are to be five of them, located at different suit- able points in the State. The sites selected are Fort Wayne, Evansville, Richmond, Terre Haute, and La- fayette. At present, and ever since the asylum has been open, patients found to be ineurable have been returned to their friends to make room for curable patients. In 1857, in consequence of the failure of appropriations in a party quarrel in the State Sen- ate, the asylums were all closed and the inmates re- turned to their homes. The insane in some cases were put in poor-houses. In others the counties made arrangements to pay for their care in the State institution here. This paralysis continued for four or five months, and then Governor Willard concluded
to borrow money and reopen the institutions, but it was some time before they fully recovered from the blow.
On the 13th of February, 1843, the Legislature levied a tax of one-fifth of a eent on one hundred dol- lars, for a fund to establish an asylum for deaf mutes. In the spring following William Willard, a deaf mute teacher in the Ohio institution, came here and opened a private school for similar sufferers in Octo- ber, receiving sixteen pupils the first year. On the 15th of January, 1844, the Legislature made the school a State institution, and Governor Whitcomb, Secretary of State William Sheets, Treasurer of State George HI. Dunn, Rev. Phineas D. Gurley, Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Rev. Love H. Jameson, Judge James Morrison, Dr. L. Dunlap, and Rev. Matthew Simpson were appointed trustees, with authority to rent a room and employ necessary teachers. They rented the residence, a large two- story frame, recently ereeted by Dr. George W. Stipp, on the southeast corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets. The State Asylum or school was opened here Oct. 1, 1844, one year after the opening of Mr. Willard's private school. In 1845 the Governor by authority appointed a new board of trustees, but con- tinued most of the old members on it. In 1846 the school was removed to the three-story brick Kinder building on the south side of Washington Street near Delaware, and remained there four' years, till the completion of the asylum building at the corner of Washington Street and State Avenue, in October, 1850. This site was selected in 1846, the trustees making a purchase of thirty acres for the necessary grounds. The building was erected in 1848-49, at à cost of thirty thousand dollars. Additions have since been made to it and to the ground, so that the latter now contains one hundred and five acres, and the aggregate cost of the former has been about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The grounds are beautifully ornamented with forest and other shade-trees and various kinds of flowers and shrubbery, with winding walks and drives and a con- servatory, besides playgrounds and an orchard and vegetable garden. The larger portion is used for pasture and farm ground. Mr. Willard was superin-
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1
tendent till 1845, then James S. Brown was appointed, and served till 1853, when he was sue- ceeded by Thomas McIntyre, who was retired under a change of system and management about three years age. The number of pupils varies from year to year, but will run from two hundred and fifty te three hundred usually. Sueeessful efforts have recently been made to teach articulate speech by metion of the lips.
In 1844-45, during the session of the Legislature, some of the pupils of the Kentucky Blind Asylum came here, under ellarge of the late William H. Churehman, and gave exhibitions at Beecher's church, which the legislators attended largely, and seemed deeply interested in one of them. Mr. Dirk Rous- seau, senator from Greene, and brother of the late Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau, proposed an arithmetical problem for one of the blind boys to solve by mental process, and not making it very clear in his oral state- ment he wrote it out, took it up to the pulpit, and carefully held it before the sightless eyes, reading it slowly, and tracing every line with his finger. For a moment the absurdity of the thing did not strike the audience, and then it all came at once in a roar that sheek the house, and that first wakened the senator's attention. He blushed, laughed, and came down to his scat. The Legislature was fully satisfied with the evidence afforded by this exhibition, and levied a two- mill tax to establish a blind asylum. The Secretary of State, John H. Thompson, Auditor Horatio J. Harris, Treasurer Royal Mayhew, with James M. Ray and Dr. G. W. Mears, were made commissioners at the following session to apply the two-mill fund, either in approving a school here or maintaining the State's pupils at the Ohio or Kentucky institutions. Mr. Churehman was appointed to address the people of the State on the subject, and ascertain the number of blind requiring publie assistance in acquiring an education. On the 27th of January, 1847, Dr. George W. Mcars, Calvin Fletcher, and James M. Ray were appointed commissioners to provide the necessary buildings and make arrangements for a school here, with an appropriation of five thousand dollars for a site and furniture and other necessaries. Seton W. Norris replaced Mr. Fletcher, who declined,
and the school was opened Oct. 1, 1847, in the same building that the Deaf and Dumb Scheel first occupied, southeast corner of Maryland and Illinois Streets. Nine pupils attended at first, but there were thirty during the session. In September, 1848, a removal was made to a three-stery briek, creeted for a work- shep, on the asylum grounds,-the twe squares north of North Street, between Pennsylvania and Meridian Streets, formerly "Pratt's Walnut Grove." Here the school was kept till the completion of the asylum proper in February, 1853. It was begun about three years before. The cost of the original building and grounds was one hundred and ten thousand dollars. The main central building is ninety fect front by sixty-one feet deep, and five stories high; at each end is a wing four stories high, thirty feet front by eighty-three fect deep. The total front from east to west is one hundred and fifty feet. A Corinthian cupola crowns the centre building. A portico stands in front of the centre, and iron galleries or colonnades surround the two lower stories of the wings. The average attendance of pupils is over one hundred, a considerable majority of whom are usually females. The superintendents have been William H. Church- man, frem Oct. 1, 1847, to Sept. 30, 1853; George W. Ames, brother of the bishop, frem Oet. I, 1853, to Sept. 30, 1855 ; William C. Larrabee, previously a professor at Asbury University, and afterwards editer of the Sentinel for a short time, from Oet. 1, 1855, to Jan. 31, 1857 ; James McWorkman, from Feb. 1, 1857, to Sept. 10, 1861 ; William H. Church- man again, frem Oet. 10, 1861.
The Female Prison and Reformatory, a short dis- tanee northeast of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, was recommended in the message of Governor Baker in 1869, and an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars made for it, under the management of a board con- sisting of Judge Elijah B. Martindale, of the city, Gen. Asahel Stone, of Winchester, and Joseph I. Irwin, of Columbus. They obtained a plan of Mr. Hodgson, architect of the eenrt-house, and went on with the work as far as they could with the money. The failure of appropriations in 1871 delayed and greatly embarrassed the Board, and the institution was not ready for the reception of subjects as early as
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HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.
it should have been by two or three years. It has now been in successful operation some eight years, under the charge of Mrs. Sarah Smith, and has realized all the reasonable expectations formed of its service. A good deal of trouble has been caused by the sewage of so large a house with so many inmates, but the last Legislature made an arrangement with the city to assist in building a sewer to connect with the city system, which will remove all ground of com- plaint. The Reformatory is one hundred and seventy- four feet long, consisting of a main central building, with side and traverse wings, one hundred and nine feet long. The whole structure is two storics high, with a basement and Mansard story. The completed portion is but a fraction of the whole contemplated structure, which is to be five hundred and twenty-five feet long. The character and purpose of the institu- tion may be best judged from the definition of them in the act creating it, drawn by Governor Baker. A " House of Refuge for the Correction and Reforma- tion of Juvenile Offenders" was provided for by an act of the Legislature approved March 8, 1867, with an appropriation of fifty thousand dollars and a board of managers consisting of Charles F. Coffin, of Wayne County, Judge A. C. Downey, of Ohio County, and Gen. Joseph Orr, of La Porte County. The " family system" of treatment was adopted under the superin- tendence of Frank B. Ainsworth and his wife, who began their service Aug. 27, 1867. On the 1st of January, 1868, a workshop and three residences were completed, and the Governor issued a proclamation that the institution was ready to receive inmates. The grounds contain two hundred and twenty-five acres, a half-mile or so south of Plainfield, Hendricks Co. The number of inmates is about two hundred usually. The institution is noticed here, though not in the county, because it forms part of the same system as the Female Reformatory, and it was really drawn to a central location by the capital.
2d. Until the fall of 1840 no man of national dis- tinction had visited Indianapolis. Gen. Harrison was here for a week in January, 1833, came on the 11th, was banqueted and made a speech on the 17th, and came again on the 13th of January, 1835 ; but at that time Gen. Harrison was little known outside of the
"Northwest Territory," which was so largely indebted to his courage and judgment, and it would be strain- ing terms a little to speak of him as a man of " national reputation." In those days of slow com- munication and of newspapers that troubled them- selves little with news, what was known in one sec- tion was not quite so readily diffused in others as now, when a night incident on the Pacific is known all along the Atlantic on both sides the next morning at breakfast. The nomination at Harrisburg in Decem- ber, 1839, was a revelation to a good many well- informed men east of the Alleghanies. For a number of years the general had been clerk of Hamilton County, withdrawn from public sight and interest, and that seclusion had helped to make his an unfamiliar name even at home among the generation that had grown up since the days of Tippecanoe and Tecum- seh. Thus it came that Indianapolis was all in a fer- ment on the 13th of October, 1840, to see the Vice- President of the United States and the reputed slayer of the great Indian chief, the statesman, Col. Richard M. Johnson. He passed the night of the 13th at a tavern a few miles east of town, Aquilla Parker's probably, and came in next morning at the head of a long procession which had gone out two or three miles to meet him. He was taken to the Walnut Grove, on the square north of the site of the Blind Asylum, and made a very indifferent little speech, in which occurred two exhibitions of indifferent taste, short as it was. Something required an allusion to the preceding Sunday and something he had done that day, and he said he had no scruples about doing necessary work on Sunday, adding by way of humor- ous enlargement that he " had written his Sunday mail report on Sunday." This was. a report on a series of petitions from over-zealous religionists asking the suppression of the transportation and distribution of the mails on Sunday, made in 1828 and so well con- structed that a good many believed somebody else wrote it. Whether true or not, it was impertinent and sure to be offensive to the religious element of the population to say it was a Sunday job. In reference to his public services he said he had " that morning at the tavern stripped to the buff and showed a friend who shared the room, the scars of five wounds re-
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ccived at the battle of the Thames." As he was on an electionecring tour, and within a month of the election, there was a rather unpleasant savor of Roman mode of electioneering in this public parade of his wounds to solicit votes. He was a better fighter than statesman. Tilghman A. Howard, who had been beaten for Governor the August before, made the speech of that occasion.
On the 11th of June, 1842, ex-President Van Buren came here, and was received, like Col. John- son, by a procession of military companies, firemen, citizens on foot and horseback and in wagons and carriages, with the music of the first brass band, and taken to the Palmer House, where he was welcomed in a formal speech, and responded, standing in the open carriage, in a very neat and graceful little ex- pression of gratitude and the usual civilities of such occasions. He had a reception at the State-House, by request of Governor Bigger, in the evening. The next day being Sunday, he attended Beecher's church in the morning and the Methodist in the evening, and left on Monday by stage for Terre Haute, getting an upset at Plainfield, it was said at the time.
Henry Clay, about whom a greater curiosity, and for whom, in consequence of the strength of the Ken- tucky settlers, a greater admiration was felt than for any other man in the nation, came here on the 5th of October, 1842. He was received east of the town by a greater crowd than was ever assembled here before, and, says Mr. Ignatius Brown, " considering the means of travel then and since, a greater crowd than has ever been gathered since." A fine woods pasture belonging to Governor Noble, east of his residence, was the place of ceremonies, which consisted of speeches and a profuse " lunch" it would be called now, but was called a " barbecue" then. There were two or three speaking-stands, but none but his own were used while Mr. Clay was speaking. Hc spoke for more than an hour, and certainly did not surpass anybody's expectations. There was no occasion for feeling or enthusiasm in a formal speech of response to a popular reception, and there was none on his side and none due to his eloquence on the other. He was followed by Senator John J. Crittenden and Governor Thomas Metcalf, " the Old Stone Hammer," who botlı
made better speeches than their chief. They were followed by Joseph Little White, a member of Con- gress from the Madison District of this State, and he made the best speech of the day. He was capable of doing it at any time, except when Mr. Clay was fully roused. He was a born orator, like Sargent S. Pren- tiss, whom he greatly resembled in intellectual readi- ness and affluence. Other speeches were made by home orators, but they have passed away with the occasion and are forty years deep in oblivion now. The entertainment continued for two days longer, in which a review of the military companies was held by the Governor, a display of fire-works made, an agri- cultural show visited, and, it was said, a three-mile race witnessed between "Bertrand" and " Little Red" on the first race-course ever opened here. It was maintained but a few years, three or four from 1841, and was situated on the south side of the Crawfords- ville road, about a mile west of the river.
On the 5th of August, 1844, Gen. Cass visited the town, and was received like his distinguished prede- cessors, though with hardly so large a display of pop- ular interest, and was escorted by the procession to the Military Ground, where Governor Whitcomb made a welcoming address, and the general responded at considerable length. A Presidential contest was at its height, and he made a strong and long electioneer- ing speech, followed by Senator Edward A. Hannegan and others. He held a reception at the Palmer House, and left in the evening for Dayton.
The great Presidential contest of 1840 excited no more feeling in any town in the Union than in Indian- apolis. · Local meetings and mass-meetings, speeches, Tippecanoe songs, Whig emblems, "log cabin" breast- pins, little canoes,-the significance of which must be traced through the final syllables of an Indian name that had no relevancy to causes,-ostentatious parade of cider-barrels, and imitations of " latch-strings," and scores of varied forms of enthusiasm that every- body felt to be silly when the fever was gone, kept the whole community in an incessant turmoil for nearly a year. Processions in weather so cold that enthusiastic Whigs froze their ears by keeping their hats waving to their " hurrahs" too long, great " dug- out" canoes filled with young ladies and little flags,
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HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS AND MARION COUNTY.
imitation cabins drawn on big ox-wagons, enormous choruses to very silly songs were the leading features of the Whig side of the contest. On the corner where the Batcs House stands, a cabin of buckeye . logs-a compliment to Gen. Harrison's Ohio residence -was built, and barrels of cider kept constantly run- ning when there was a Whig meeting in the town. One of the Whig songs, and the most popular, because, like the lion's part in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," it " was nothing but roaring," and capable of employing all the strength of all the lungs within the radius of a half-mile, began thus :
" What has cansed this great commotion, motion, metion, The country threngh ?
It is the ball a rolling on for Tippecanoe and Tyler too, And with them we'll beat little Van. Van, Van is a used up man, And with them we'll beat little Van !"
It makes one feel cheap to think that such rubbish as that could have any effect on the opinions or action of a great nation, but it had. " Lillibullero" was not better, and it helped James II. off the throne, so our folly of 1840 was not singular. On the Demo- eratic side the contest was managed in a much more decorous way. They could not help it, for they had nothing in their cause or candidate to excite enthu- siasm, and, in the expressive slang of to-day, the Whigs had "got the bulge." The Democrats had too many sins of a long period of power to answer for. Centre township gave thirteen hundred and eighty- seven votes in the Presidential election in November, and Harrison got eight hundred and seventy-two to five hundred and fifteen for Van Buren. The popu- lation of the town in 1840 by the census was two thousand six hundred and ninety-two.
The contest of 1844 was not so one-sided. The Democrats did quite as much fooling as the Whigs. They raised hickory-poles and the Whigs raised ash- poles, a suggestion of Mr. Clay's home at Ashland, about as apt and significant as the eanoe of 1840. Both sides had singing clubs, and sang the silliest of rhyming rant to the most monotonous of " nigger" tunes, then in the first full tide of popularity. "Old Dan Tucker," "Lucy Long," "The Blue-Tailed Fly," " Buffalo Gals" were the favorite airs of both sides.
The Whigs for some reason made the " coon" a party symbol, but what it symbolized nobody appeared to know. It was paraded numerously in processions and mass-meetings, and Whigs often alluded to themselves as "coons," and spoke of the thieving little beast with affectionate rapture. One of their songs expressed this preposterous sentiment :
"In Lindenwald the fox is holod, The coons alt laugh to hear it told. With ha ! ha! ha! what a nominee Is James K. Polk, of Tennessee !"
Van Buren's "pet name" was the "fox" in 1840, and Lindenwald was his home. But out of all this fuss and flummery there never came any intelligible reason for the adoption of the coon as a party symbol or suggestion. The Democrats ought to have balanced the ease by adopting the " possum," but they did not. In 1840 the Democratic ladies made little show in the parades, while the Whig ladies were active and con- stant in all that could help their friends. In 1844 the female part of the contest was very evenly bal- anced. That was the last of the roaring, singing, pole-raising, political folly. The annexation of Texas, the Mexican war, and the growing prominence of the slavery problem made issues too serious for empty or ribald songs and the puerile agencies that had served their turn and needed to be forgotten.
3d. There may be grouped here a number of little items of city progress of no special importance in themselves, but worth notice, as first things always are, if they grow to importance later. In the spring of 1840 the Council made two fire cisterns, the first of the kind. In July, 1842, T. W. Whitridge, who subsequently became quite a distinguished artist in New York, opened the first daguerrean gallery here, but afterwards betook almost exclusively to painting. At this time and before, Jacob Cox, the oldest and most eminent artist in the State, was painting por- traits occasionally while working at his trade as a tinner. During the fall of 1842, James Blake, always foremost in enterprise, or only mated by Nicholas McCarty, began the manufacture of molas- scs from the juice of corn-stalks, a prophecy of the later sorghum manufacture which he lived to see. The enterprise failed soon, because the product was
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