Lanesville Heritage Weekend parade, 1985. Author’s photo.
Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part 5: Those Scoreboard Daze of Old (Second Movement)
Kicking off the sixth and seventh parts of my “40 Years in Beer” series, here’s a brief digression about living in Indiana my whole damn life.
Even as teeny tiny babies, Hoosiers grasp that in Indiana, all roads lead to Indianapolis. This useful information probably never occurs to people living in or near the capital city. For the rest of us, it’s a lesson we’re seldom allowed to forget.
Indianapolis regards itself not only as the crossroads of Indiana, but of America itself. Our state governmental bureaucracy behaves accordingly, and the sole point of reference uniting far-flunk outposts like Ft. Wayne, Evansville, the Chicagoland suburbs and my home base of New Albany is a shared recognition that Indianapolis will always suck all the air from any available rooms.
Partly because of this centralizing tendency, Southern Indiana – where I’ve spent the past 62 years – often finds itself rendered into an abstraction, as much a mental construct as quantifiable geography.
The Ohio River defines the entirety of Indiana’s southern border with Bourbonland (formerly known as “Kentucky”), and in antebellum times the river was a de facto extension of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Read the story at Indiana Public Media.
One of New Albany’s principal downtown landmarks is the Town Clock Church, a documented station on the Underground Railroad. Slavery existed on the “other” side of the river, a few hundred yards from the church.
However the boundary wasn’t squeaky clean. Indiana may have remained in the Union during the Civil War, and the state’s soldiers were an integral part of the military effort, and yet many vicinities in Southern Indiana were more secessionist than not. Some remain so today.
Maybe this is why so many Hoosiers believe Kentucky actually begins somewhere around the south side of Seymour. This way they’re able to claim John Mellencamp as their own, while consigning the remainder of the Hoosier side of the Ohio Valley to what they imagine is a form of redneck purgatory.
(As an asi ......
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