Hoosier History Live

With the Indiana Legislature in full swing, it's ideal timing to spotlight the Indiana State Capitol, including history stories from its top (the dome) to its bottom (the cavernous basement, which once held everything from cannon balls to bathtubs for legislators and secret staircases). We also will time travel to an era before the current Statehouse, built of limestone, opened in 1888.

Before that, state lawmakers met in an earlier Statehouse built in 1835 that unwisely involved the extensive use of stucco on the exterior. Suffice it to say that the "stucco Statehouse" did not hold up well during Indiana winters. After the ceiling came crashing down in 1867 in the room where the House of Representatives met (fortunately, the legislature was not in session during the collapse), state leaders realized the stucco structure desperately needed to be demolished and initiated plans to construct the current State Capitol building. But there were controversies from the start with the so-called "People's House", including squabbles among prospective architects and cost-cutting moves that impacted the design of the dome, as our guest has written about.

Our guide for Statehouse stories will be a retired lawyer and lobbyist, Libby Cierzniak, who now writes a blog about Indianapolis city history, indypolitan.com. Her most recent blog post, titled "What lies beneath: Secrets of the Statehouse basement", describes an astounding range of creepy, colorful or just plain unexpected items and uses for the subterranean level.

Getting a jump on Women's History Month, Hoosier History Live will spotlight the trail-blazing woman who wrote the first cookbook published in Indiana. Also on the menu: We will explore food fashions of the mid-18th century era when the cookbook came out.

The author was Angelina Collins (1805-1885), who was living in New Albany, Ind., when her popular cookbook was published in 1851. Titled "Mrs. Collins' Table Receipts" (and retitled "The Great Western Cookbook" when it was reprinted in New York later during the 1850s), the cookbook "is an excellent reflection of the dishes served in middle class homes in mid-century Indiana", our guest says. (The word "receipts", as in the title of the book, was often used during the era to refer to recipes.)

Our guest will be Indianapolis-based food historian Sheryl Vanderstel, an expert on foodways of late 18th century America through the pre-Civil War era. With more than 20 years of experience as a historic consultant to museums and historical societies in researching and developing programs, Sheryl helped launch the hearthside dinners at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park.

Buckle up to time travel to World War II and the post-war era as Hoosier History Live explores Indiana connections to the acclaimed Tuskegee Airmen. There even are Indiana/Tuskegee links; such as MOAA, to the aerial competition that eventually became known as "Top Gun", the inspiration for blockbuster movies.

This show follows up a program in 2017 that delved into the lives of several Hoosiers who were fighter pilots in the trailblazing squadron, which drew its name from the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. This time, as Hoosier History Live salutes Black History Month, we will spotlight an aviator and educator from Angola, Ind., who became the director for the first two phases of flight training for the Tuskegee Airmen. Not only that, four of the Tuskegee pilots trained by Dr. Lewis Jackson (1912-1994) went to win the championship trophy in the first U.S. Air Force competition that came to be called "Top Gun". Those pilots in that initial competition (officially called the Air Force Fighter Gunnery Meet) were flying an aircraft made in Evansville, a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt.

Our guide for all of this and other Tuskegee/Indiana connections will be Reginald DuValle, an Indianapolis native who graduated in 1979 from the U.S. Air Force Academy. Known as "Reg", he is the past president of the Indianapolis chapter of Tuskegee Airmen Inc, a nonprofit that honors members of the all-black Army air squadron who served during an era when the military was segregated.

One persistent myth about Strawtown is that the village in Hamilton County near the White River came close to being designated the new state capital of Indiana more than 200 years ago.

Other myths involve Chief Straw, the supposed namesake of the village who has been described as an early Native American leader in central Indiana. Even though a 10-foot monument to Chief Straw was built in the 1920s in his honor, historians now doubt that he ever existed. The monument to Chief Straw, who was said to be a leader of the Lenape (or Delaware) tribe during the 1780s, is now on private property.

To sift myths from facts about Strawtown, Hamilton County historian David Heighway will be Nelson's guest on this encore broadcast of a show originally broadcast on July 17, 2021.

David has been a guest on several other Hoosier History Live shows, including a program in 2017 about the violent early era of Fishers. David's popular presentations about the rough-and-tumble chapter in Fishers history of the 1870s continually surprise those who regard the suburban city as a sleepy farm town before its explosive growth in recent decades.

Excuse the creepy topics, but isn't it Halloween season? Appropriate, then, to time-travel to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when, as our guest puts it, "the city of Indianapolis had all the makings of a perfect horror movie set, the largest saw factory in the world, acres of stockyards and slaughterhouses, and the specter of ceilings dripping with something that appeared to be blood but on closer inspection would turn out to be catsup."

With the multiple slaughterhouses and pork-packing businesses, the king of the heap for about 100 years was unquestionably Kingan & Co., which had a five-story plant as part of a massive operation that encompassed 27 acres spanning both sides of the White River west of downtown Indy. Ironically, thousands of hogs once were slaughtered daily at the enterprise not far from the site today of the Indianapolis Zoo.

Major landmarks in downtown Indianapolis today include Lucas Oil Stadium, the home of the Indianapolis Colts. During the early 1900s, though, the site was the home of Arab Americans. A thoroughfare in the neighborhood called Willard Street (which vanished in the 1920s as the area was repurposed) was the hub of what was known as the city's "Syrian colony" because most of the Arab Americans residents then were of Syrian and Lebanese heritage.

Today, Marion County is the home of more than 5,600 Arab Americans, while about 3,200 others live in neighboring Hamilton County, according to arabindianapolis.com, a multimedia project. In addition to Syria and Lebanon, the immigrants or their descendants now come from an array of homelands, including Egypt, Jordan and Morocco.

Hoosier History Live will explore the Arab American heritage in Indianapolis (which has been far more extensive and has deeper roots than many realize) during the next in our rotating series about ethnic immigration.

The IndyCar season has ended, but doesn't widespread interest continue year-around among many Hoosiers in all things related to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway?

So rather than making a pit stop, Hoosier History Live will explore the evolution of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, which has been located near the south entrance to the Speedway off W. 16th Street since 1976. About 20 years earlier, the museum had opened (in a much smaller version) in the administrative and ticket offices for the world-famous racetrack.

When it kicked off in the mid-1950s, the museum displayed six race cars. Today, visitors can check out 34 winning cars of the Indianapolis 500, plus other history-making autos. Dozens and dozens of other historic cars are stored in the basement, which periodically can be seen on special, guided tours. The museum also houses non-auto collections including trophies, artwork, driver artifacts and a trove of documents.

Even by the spring of 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic had created enough medical and social history in Indiana for Hoosier History Live to explore it in a show. Since then, additional history has unfolded, so we will follow up with another show that will touch on everything from the overwhelming challenges that confronted Indiana hospitals last fall and winter to the resistance to vaccinations.

"Vaccination, especially for children, has turned out to be a hard sell," says Shari Rudavsky, the health and medical reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who has covered the Covid pandemic since the earliest cases were reported in Indiana. Shari, who has a PhD in the history and sociology of science, will return as Nelson's guest to share insights about various aspects of Covid history since our previous show, which was broadcast just as initial vaccinations were being made widely available.

"Even with vaccines, Covid maintains power to be a major societal disruptor," Shari says. She adds: "In the past year, the virus has mutated, getting better at ducking vaccines even if you are vaccinated. But vaccines do greatly decrease one's risk of hospitalization and death."

Just as cities and small towns in Indiana have evolved during more than 200 years of statehood, so have their cemeteries. Hoosier History Live will explore that evolution, particularly the changes in the ways cemeteries have been designed and landscaped.

This will include a look at the Rural Cemetery Movement that began in the mid-1800s and involved creating professionally designed cemeteries in park-like settings. Several of the largest cemeteries in the state, from Indianapolis and Fort Wayne to Terre Haute and Evansville, were created as part of the Rural Cemetery Movement.

Before that movement, graveyards in the early 1800s were much different, says Jeannie Regan-Dinius, director of historic preservation at Crown Hill Heritage Foundation in Indianapolis. She will be Nelson's guest to share insights about the evolution of cemetery design as well as challenges that currently confront cemeteries across the state as, in her words, they "struggle with the historic landscape, the upkeep of tombstones, mausoleums and the natural environment. The debate over which is more important, the landscape or the tombstones, pulls on funds, volunteer time and decisions made."

As many Hoosiers begin to focus on the picturesque county in far-western Indiana that touts itself as the "Covered Bridge Capital of the Country", Hoosier History Live will spotlight colorful and trail-blazing historic men and women from Parke County and the nearby area. Our guest will be a popular author, storyteller and photographer based in Parke County, which hosts an annual Covered Bridge Festival every October.

The historic characters will include an eccentric, homeopathic doctor who (according to folklore) buried his money around his Parke County property before he died in the late 1940s; Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown, a farm boy with a mangled hand (from two accidents, including a mishap with a corn thresher) who went on to become the star pitcher for the Chicago Cubs in the 1908 World Series, and a glamorous Broadway and silent movie actress who ended up penniless. When Valeska Suratt died in 1962, she was buried in an unmarked grave at Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute; a headstone was finally erected a few months ago after a local fund-raising campaign.