Hoosier History Live

(August 31 2019) "I love that there are still inns where Lincoln stayed," says travel writer Jane Ammeson, who has been a popular Roadtrip correspondent on Hoosier History Live for several years.

Although her radio reports, magazine articles and books cover a range of historic topics, Jane has narrowed her focus in her newest book, Lincoln Road Trip: The Back-Roads Guide to America's Favorite President (Red Lightning Books).

As most Hoosiers know, Abraham Lincoln grew up in southern Indiana. As a 7-year-old, he and his family moved from Kentucky to the wilderness area that became Spencer County; the Lincolns arrived in 1816, the same year Indiana achieved statehood.

We will reach beyond the boundaries of Indiana when Jane joins Nelson as a studio guest to explore some of the inns, homes, mills and recreated historic sites with a connection to Lincoln (1809-1865), his extended family and the historical events associated with his life.

Our itinerary for the show includes traveling to Kentucky to explore the Old Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, which opened as an inn in 1779. Abe Lincoln was about five when he stayed at the inn; according to Lincoln Road Trip, it is considered "one of the oldest taverns in continuous operation in the United States and the oldest stagecoach stop west of the Allegheny Mountains."

Guests at an inn in Corydon, Indiana's first state capital, included Josiah Lincoln, Abe's uncle. Josiah (the brother of Thomas Lincoln, father of the future president) visited the Kintner Tavern after he moved to Harrison County to establish a 160-acre farm near Corydon in the early 1800s, according to Lincoln Road Trip. Although the original tavern was destroyed by a fire, its owner, Jacob Kintner, later opened the Kintner House Inn, which still stands.

And here's another Lincoln-connected bit of trivia about Harrison County: Because there are no direct descendants remaining of Abraham Lincoln - the last, his great-grandson Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, died in 1985 - descendants of Josiah Lincoln are considered, as Jane puts it, "among the closest living kin of the greatest American president." Many of Josiah Lincoln's descendants continue to live in Harrison County or nearby.

Thousands of visitors from across the country have seen the burial sites of Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and his older sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Spencer County. The site includes a recreation of the log cabin the Lincolns built when they moved to the Little Pigeon Creek settlement in the wilderness.

"It was a region with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods," Lincoln recalled later in life. "There I grew up."

Our guest Jane Ammeson notes that the Lincoln family was related through marriage to the extended family of frontier explorer Daniel Boone. So Lincoln Road Trip highlights historic sites associated with the Boones, which we also explore during our show.

These sites include Squire Boone Caverns in Harrison County, which Janes describes as a "magical and mystical" cave system with an underground waterfall. Squire Boone, Daniel's younger brother, lived near the caverns in southeastern Indiana for the final 11 years of his life. When he died in 1815 at age 71, Squire Boone asked his children to bury him in one of the passageways of the cave system. Today, Squire Boone Caverns is a popular tourist attraction, and visitors often stop in the area that includes his casket.

Also during our show, we explore the Colonel William Jones State Historic Site near the town of Gentryville in southwestern Indiana. Jones ran a general store during Abe Lincoln's teenage years, employing him as a clerk and discussing political issues with him. After the Lincoln family moved to Illinois, Abe Lincoln spent the night at Jones' house during a return visit to Indiana.

During the Civil War, Jones was killed at the Battle of Atlanta in 1864, his former clerk serving as commander-in-chief. The house in Gentryville, which Jones designed in the Federal style, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

(August 17, 2019) If the decades seem to have zipped by with the speed of a competitive cyclist, brace yourselves: The movie Breaking Away, filmed in and around Bloomington, opened in theaters across the country 40 years ago this summer.

The film became an unexpected hit in 1979 and won an Academy Award for its screenwriter, Indiana University graduate Steve Tesich, who drew inspiration from his fraternity's victory in the Little 500 bicycle race. He based the film's central character on his fraternity brother Dave Blase, a zoology major and avid cyclist at IU in the early 1960s who used to sing Italian arias as he rode over the hills of Monroe County.

Now 79 years old, Dave Blase is retired after a long career as a biology teacher, including 39 years on the faculty of Arlington High School in Indianapolis. Dave Blase is Nelson's studio guest and shares insights about his early life (he grew up in Speedway), the impact of Breaking Away (in which the aria-singing protagonist is named Dave Stoller), and how his life has unfolded during the 40 years since the release of the movie.

"Dave had this fanatical attachment to the sport," Tesich recalled in an interview with Nelson, our host, a few years before the screenwriter's death in 1996. "It was almost a romantic involvement."

The Phi Kappa Psi brothers won the Little 500 in 1962, with Dave Blase as the undeniable star of the team. Several factors influenced his fondness for all things Italian, including the fact that he had spent a semester working as a researcher at a campus medical center with Italian doctors. It also didn't hurt that cyclists from Italy had dominated the competition at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

In Breaking Away, the "townie" characters on the scrappy Little 500 team hail from working-class families who cut limestone in the quarries near Bloomington. The team members, who call themselves "Cutters," feud with preppy IU students, competing not only in the Little 500, but also for the attention of sorority members.

In interviews over the years, Dave Blase has said that during his boyhood in Speedway, he had minimal interest in sports, including cycling. That changed at IU, culminating in his spectacular performance in the Little 500 in 1962, in which he rode 139 of the 200 laps and set campus records.

With only a $2.4 million budget - modest even for the time - Breaking Away was filmed in Bloomington and elsewhere in Monroe County during the summer and fall of 1978, then released the next year.

Steve Tesich, the screenwriter, was born in 1942 in what was then Yugoslavia. At age 14, he immigrated with his family to East Chicago, Ind. After winning the Oscar for Breaking Away, Tesich wrote the screenplay for Four Friends (1981), an autobiographical movie about an Eastern European immigrant who comes of age in northwestern Indiana.

"I had heard from my frat brothers about a freshman who showed up on campus with a 10-speed bicycle, which was unusual in those days," Dave Blase told Nelson several years ago, referring to his initial meeting on campus with Tesich in the fall of 1961.

Breaking Away, though, is set in the late 1970s. The film, in which Dennis Christopher played the Dave Stoller character, was such a success that it inspired a short-lived TV series starring teen idol Shaun Cassidy in the role.

By then, Dave Blase was teaching at Arlington High School. Although he had continued to race competitively after he graduated from IU and through his 20s, he found that the occasional prize money he won was not enough to support a family. He had met his wife Yolande, who is Dutch, during a bicycling excursion through Europe.

The two now live on the northeast side of Indianapolis and are the parents of two grown children.

(August 24, 2019) In the early years of Prohibition, nearly 35 percent of all of the illegal liquor in the country was controlled by a teetotaler, a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur who owned a chain of distilleries and pharmacies across nine states.

Known as the "Bootleg King" during the early 1920s, George Remus was based in Cincinnati but had several connections to Indiana, including one of his top revenue sources, the Squibb distillery in Lawrenceburg on the Ohio River.

Many of his rum-runners came from Indiana and stayed at "Death Valley," his heavily-guarded farm just west of Cincinnati that served as a storage area for his vast quantities of alcohol.

The posh Claypool Hotel in downtown Indianapolis was one of the favorite lodging spots for Remus and his glamorous wife, Imogene.

The Claypool also was where, in the middle of the night, Remus tracked down Imogene when she was staying at the hotel with a car salesman. Remus, in a jealous rage, nearly beat the salesman to death in the elegant hotel.

The social history, national impact and Indiana connections of the colorful "Bootleg King" is the focus of our show, with New York-based author Karen Abbott joining Nelson by phone. Abbott (as she prefers to be called), is the author of The Ghosts of Eden Park (Crown Publishing), a new book about Remus, his lavish lifestyle and his crimes.

Abbott shared insights about Remus and the era of Prohibition during a presentation at the Indiana History Center.

Abbott noted that a courthouse in Indianapolis was the setting for one of his federal trials; in 1925, he was accused of crimes associated with a Jack Daniels distillery.

During the trial, Remus stayed at the lavish Claypool, which, with its rival, the Hotel Lincoln, was the focus of a Hoosier History Live show in March.

According to Abbott, Remus probably was the inspiration for the fictional character of Jay Gatsby, the central figure in The Great Gatsby, the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 1925. Like Gatsby, Remus owned a string of pharmacies, lived in an opulent mansion and, as Abbott puts it, "was obsessed with an enigmatic woman."

Remus, the son of impoverished German immigrants, came to the United States as a child in the 1870s. Because his father was an alcoholic, Remus vowed as a boy that he would never "drink a drop" of liquor, according to The Ghosts of Eden Park.

Although he stuck to that vow on a personal level, he oversaw a bootleg operation based in Cincinnati that was so massive he had 3,000 people on his payroll and a fleet of 147 trucks.

His chief adversary was Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice based in Washington DC. According to our guest Karen Abbott, Willebrandt was "the most powerful woman in the country" during the early 1920s and was in charge of thousands of alcohol-related cases during Prohibition.

Her challenges in bringing Remus to justice included his bribes to federal agents and what Abbott describes as his "cozy relationships" with top federal administrators, including Willebrandt's coworkers and supervisors.

(August 17, 2019) If the decades seem to have zipped by with the speed of a competitive cyclist, brace yourselves: The movie Breaking Away, filmed in and around Bloomington, opened in theaters across the country 40 years ago this summer.

The film became an unexpected hit in 1979 and won an Academy Award for its screenwriter, Indiana University graduate Steve Tesich, who drew inspiration from his fraternity's victory in the Little 500 bicycle race. He based the film's central character on his fraternity brother Dave Blase, a zoology major and avid cyclist at IU in the early 1960s who used to sing Italian arias as he rode over the hills of Monroe County.

Now 79 years old, Dave Blase is retired after a long career as a biology teacher, including 39 years on the faculty of Arlington High School in Indianapolis. Dave Blase is Nelson's studio guest and shares insights about his early life (he grew up in Speedway), the impact of Breaking Away (in which the aria-singing protagonist is named Dave Stoller), and how his life has unfolded during the 40 years since the release of the movie.

"Dave had this fanatical attachment to the sport," Tesich recalled in an interview with Nelson, our host, a few years before the screenwriter's death in 1996. "It was almost a romantic involvement."

The Phi Kappa Psi brothers won the Little 500 in 1962, with Dave Blase as the undeniable star of the team. Several factors influenced his fondness for all things Italian, including the fact that he had spent a semester working as a researcher at a campus medical center with Italian doctors. It also didn't hurt that cyclists from Italy had dominated the competition at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

In Breaking Away, the "townie" characters on the scrappy Little 500 team hail from working-class families who cut limestone in the quarries near Bloomington. The team members, who call themselves "Cutters," feud with preppy IU students, competing not only in the Little 500, but also for the attention of sorority members.

In interviews over the years, Dave Blase has said that during his boyhood in Speedway, he had minimal interest in sports, including cycling. That changed at IU, culminating in his spectacular performance in the Little 500 in 1962, in which he rode 139 of the 200 laps and set campus records.

With only a $2.4 million budget - modest even for the time - Breaking Away was filmed in Bloomington and elsewhere in Monroe County during the summer and fall of 1978, then released the next year.

Steve Tesich, the screenwriter, was born in 1942 in what was then Yugoslavia. At age 14, he immigrated with his family to East Chicago, Ind. After winning the Oscar forBreaking Away, Tesich wrote the screenplay for Four Friends (1981), an autobiographical movie about an Eastern European immigrant who comes of age in northwestern Indiana.

"I had heard from my frat brothers about a freshman who showed up on campus with a 10-speed bicycle, which was unusual in those days," Dave Blase told Nelson several years ago, referring to his initial meeting on campus with Tesich in the fall of 1961.

Breaking Away, though, is set in the late 1970s. The film, in which Dennis Christopher played the Dave Stoller character, was such a success that it inspired a short-lived TV series starring teen idol Shaun Cassidy in the role.

By then, Dave Blase was teaching at Arlington High School. Although he had continued to race competitively after he graduated from IU and through his 20s, he found that the occasional prize money he won was not enough to support a family. He had met his wife Yolande, who is Dutch, during a bicycling excursion through Europe.

The two now live on the northeast side of Indianapolis and are the parents of two grown children.

(August 10, 2019) Has there been an ardent Indianapolis Indians fan since the 1950s who has not known the name Max Schumacher? Often called "Mr. Indianapolis Baseball," Max worked for the minor-league baseball franchise for more than 60 years, in positions ranging from ticket manager all the way up to president.

Not only did he spearhead the effort to build Victory Field in downtown Indy in the mid '90s, he actually began his career by working for Owen Bush, the namesake of historic Bush Stadium, which had been the Indians' home field since 1931.

Now chairman emeritus of the Indians (the franchise is managed by two of his sons), Max has written a book to convey some of the highlights of his long career. In Extra Innings: My Life in Baseball (Blue River Press), Max shares insights about wild promotions, players who passed through the Indians before achieving stardom in the major leagues, and periodic drama in the team's front office.

To explore the mounds of history associated with the Indians - who are currently the Triple-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, following years of affiliation with a range of major league teams, including the Cleveland Indians and the Cincinnati Reds - Max joins Nelson as his studio guest. So does his Extra Innings co-author, Mark Montieth, the award-winning Indianapolis-based sportswriter.

As a student at Shortridge High School, Max attended Indians games with his lifelong friend Richard Lugar (both were members of the class of '50), who wrote the foreword to Extra Inningsbefore he died in April. After Shortridge, Max played baseball at Butler University for another legendary figure: Tony Hinkle, the three-sport coach who became the namesake of Hinkle Fieldhouse.

Future Hall of Famers who played for the Indians early in their careers included Harmon Killebrew, who was 24 years old in 1958 when, as Max notes in Extra Innings, he had a dismal season in Indy.

If some fans are not aware that Killebrew (who hit more than 570 home runs for the Washington Senators after leaving Indianapolis) ever came up to bat at Bush Stadium, few have forgotten the most popular player in Indians history: charismatic Razor Shines, who spent most of nine seasons with the team during the 1980s and '90s. Invariably introduced over the public address system as "R-r-r-r-r-r-azor Shines," he will be among the notables that Max and Mark will discuss during our show.

Some Indians history facts:

• In 1955, the Indians came close to leaving Indianapolis. The team, which was losing money, was affiliated with the Cleveland Indians then. Max and Mark will explain how the team managed to remain in Indy.
• Bush Stadium was nearly slated for demolition after the Indians moved to the newly opened Victory Field at White River State Park in 1996, but then made history by becoming the first former baseball stadium in the country to be converted into residential housing. Historic preservationist John Watson of Core Redevelopmentdiscussed the conversion during a Hoosier History Live show in 2013. Stadium Lofts apartments opened later that year.
• Max Schumacher was named a Living Legend by the Indiana Historical Society in 2012.

(August 3, 2019) Shortly after the Civil War, a notorious crime spree unfolded across the Midwest that included the country's first robbery of a moving train. The perpetrators were bandits in a gang organized by brothers who grew up on a farm near Seymour, Ind., in Jackson County. The outlaws also pulled off what may have been the first peacetime train robbery in U.S. history.

The notorious Reno Brothers - whose history-making train robbery occurred on Oct. 6, 1866 - are the focus of this encore show originally broadcast April 14, 2018. The gang included brothers Frank, John, Simeon ("Sim") and William Reno, who had begun looting businesses before the Civil War.

Their most infamous crime occurred May 22, 1868 as the Jefferson, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad train was proceeding through Marshfield, Ind., about 17 miles south of Seymour. The Renos and their gang boarded the train, overpowered the engineer, threw one of his co-workers out a door, broke into an express car and eventually made off with about $96,000.

As train robberies and other crimes by the Reno gang persisted, Jackson County residents formed vigilante committees. Pinkerton detectives were hired to capture the gang.

To describe the Reno Brothers' crime spree, William "Bill" Bell, a retired law enforcement officer based in Indianapolis, is Nelson's studio guest. Bill, who writes for several magazines about the Old West, has researched and written about the Reno Brothers for Wild Westmagazine. In a 38-year career, Bill worked as a police officer, deputy sheriff, U.S. border patrolman and as a U.S. Customs worker. He is a member of the Scarlet Mask Vigilance Society, which is named after one of the vigilante organizations that, as Bill puts it, "finally put a stop to the depredations of the notorious Reno Brothers."

According to Bill's research, the Reno family came to Indiana in 1813, when the grandfather of the brothers arrived from Kentucky. Frank, John, Sim and William Reno grew up on a 1,200-acre farm. Another brother, Clinton, and a sister, Laura, "apparently never entered into the illicit activities of their siblings," Bill writes.

As an early headquarters, the Reno Brothers and their gang used a dilapidated building in the small Jackson County town of Rockford; later, their base was a hotel in Seymour. Before the historic train robberies, the Renos committed a series of post office robberies and murders.

According to Bill Bell's article, the Reno gang's robbery of an Ohio & Mississippi Railroad train as it left the Seymour depot in 1866 means that the brothers can be blamed for "opening the door to the train robbery era, which featured Jesse and Frank James, and, later, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

The Reno Brothers were suspects in arson fires that swept through Rockford and in the slayings of residents who could have testified against them in court.

In 1868, several members of the Reno gang, including Frank, William and Sim Reno, were captured in separate apprehensions. They were taken to New Albany, the Ohio River town in Floyd County with a "big stone jail, considered the strongest in southern Indiana," according to Bill's article. (John Reno had been arrested previously and was imprisoned in Missouri, where members of the Reno Gang had robbed banks and a county treasurer's office.)

Determined to make the Reno Brothers pay for their crimes, nearly 100 members of a vigilante society in Jackson County took trains to New Albany one night in December. The vigilantes showed up at the Floyd County jail at about 3 a.m., masked and armed with revolvers and clubs. They overpowered the jailers, the Floyd County sheriff and Floyd County commissioners, and dragged Frank, William and Sim Reno one-by-one out of their cells and executed them by hanging. After the lynchings, the vigilantes returned by train by Seymour.

The bodies of the three Reno Brothers who had been lynched were turned over to their sister Laura and were buried side by side in Seymour City Cemetery. The fenced graves of the infamous bandits can be visited by going up a stone walkway from 9th St in Seymour.

To learn more about the Reno Brothers' lasting impact on American culture, listen to "The First Train Robbery," a bluegrass song written by Chris Stout and performed here by Larry Cordle.

(July 27, 2019) With midsummer upon us, it's time to pour a glass of iced tea, sit on the porch and soak up some of the history that grows in the lush gardens of Indiana. Guest host Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp, AKA the Hoosier Gardener, explores the rich horticultural heritage of the Hoosier state.

First stop on Jo Ellen's tour of Indiana's garden history: Zionsville. Turns out that the historic village (now a booming suburb of Indianapolis) played an important role in the development and marketing of flowers for use in home gardens.

Nearly a century ago, Zionsville gained the nickname "Dahlia City," thanks to the success of two neighboring nurseries located in the village. Both produced not only dahlia tubers, but other showy flowers as well, which they sold locally and across the country through mail-order catalogs.

Zionsville became known as one of the best places to purchase tubers to produce colorful, spectacular blooms.

The story of Zionsville and the dahlias comes from Mark Zelonis, who joins Jo Ellen in studio to discuss Indiana's horticultural history. Mark has spent an entire career directing beautiful gardens, including those at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Mark is a frequent lecturer on gardens and landscape history and recently formed a new company, Cultural Excursions, through which he leads tours to gardens, museums and historic sites in the U.S. and Europe.

Mark tells how early 20th century promoters of the growing Zionsville community touted the town's attractiveness to potential new homeowners and businesses and probably coined the nickname "Dahlia City." The craze for dahlias eventually waned, however, and by the 1940s both nurseries had closed.

Some of Zionsville's floral legacy has been sadly lost: it appears the dahlia variety Zion's Pride is no longer available in the trade. However, town officials recently named a new road on the south side of town Dahlia Drive to recognize this colorful aspect of the village's history.

Also joining Jo Ellen in studio: landscape architect David Gorden, co-owner of Mark M. Holeman Inc., landscape company.

Jo Ellen, Mark and David share stories of some of the state's most beautiful landscapes and how they convey a unique sense of place. Among the most culturally significant of these gardens: twenty "Hidden Treasures" that have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places. These include Lindenwood Cemetery in Fort Wayne, Deming Park in Terre Haute, and the Historic New Harmony Labyrinth.

Within the boundaries of Indianapolis, garden lovers can revel in the beauty of Garfield Park, designed by George Kessler, and Oldfields, the estate garden designed by Percival Gallagher of the famed Olmsted Brothers landscape firm.

Yet another important historic garden to explore with Jo Ellen and her guests: the recently restored Riverdale estate landscape designed by Jens Jensen, now part of the campus of Marian University. The Friends of Riverdale raised $1.4 million to restore the century-old landscape that recently won an award from Indiana Landmarks. Riverdale also figures into Hoosier racing history: it is the former estate of James A. Allison, one of the founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Also on the agenda for discussion: the value of native plants in Indiana gardens. There's growing interest in these plants as gardeners, urban planners, horticulturist, garden centers, nurseries and landscape architects learn more about the role of native perennials, trees and shrubs in sustainable gardens. A good example is public interest in milkweed, the only family of plants beloved monarch butterflies use to lay their eggs.

(July 13, 2019) During the 1820s, it was a key factor in determining the site of the new city of Indianapolis. But there was a major misconception that became obvious when a steamboat got stuck and became the object of ridicule.

Soon it became an aquatic dumping ground, with complaints about pollution surfacing by the 1880s in both Marion and Hamilton Counties. During the early 1900s, it was the setting for baptism events that involved hundreds of people on Sundays; the practice ended because of typhoid outbreaks.

In the mid-1970s, an Indianapolis-based rock music radio station sponsored hippie-oriented raft races in which competitors paddled aboard discarded sofas, debris and other makeshift watercraft.

In recent decades, however, significant efforts have been undertaken to clean up the White River.

Now, in the wake of the White River Vision Plan recently unveiled by Marion and Hamilton County civic leaders, Hoosier History Live explores all aspects - the good, the bad and the filthy - of the compelling history of the waterway that has been called "an under-utilized community asset." Nelson's studio guests are:

• Kevin Hardie, executive director of the Friends of the White River, who has been involved with the nonprofit since its inception in 1985. His staff role was created in 1999 after a controversial fish kill episode made national news; a chemical discharge from a manufacturing plant in Anderson was blamed for killing as many as 5 million fish.
• Hamilton County historian David Heighway, who has written blog posts about a wide range of aspects of White River history that have had an impact on residents of Noblesville and other nearby towns. The White River was used as a power source by grist mills and other businesses from the earliest eras of the communities, according to David. His research even has uncovered newspaper accounts in 1892 that describe sightings of a Loch Ness-style monster in the river.
• And Alex Umlauf, co-chair of the White River committee of Reconnecting to Our Waterways (ROW) and a former staff member of White River State Park. Both Kevin and Alex conduct on-water tours of the White River.

Assumptions that the White River would be navigable as a major trade route were a significant factor when state leaders in the 1820s selected the site of the Indiana's new capital city.

In 1831, a steamboat called the General Hanna (overseen by a Brigadier General Robert Hanna) ran aground near Indianapolis and was left in the river for several months.

The humiliating episode, known as Hanna's Folly, convinced Hoosiers that the river could not handle large ships of any kind.

Near the river's edge just west of downtown Indianapolis, Kingan & Co. opened a huge meat-packing operation in the late 19th century; environmentalists eventually criticized the operation and other industries for using the river as a way to dispose of waste.

"As late as the 1950s, state environmental employees sampling the river using a rowboat would have animal entrails hanging from the oars while there were on the river downtown," according to our guest Kevin Hardie.

Colorful watercraft were seen on the White River during the WNAP Raft Racesthat began in July 1974 and drew thousands of spectators to Broad Ripple Park. Organized by the former WNAP-FM, a radio station popular with young listeners, the raft races were described as "Central Indiana's version of Woodstock."

The White River Vision Plan has been put together to guide decision-making for the next 30 years. According to a recent story published in the Indianapolis Business Journal, the plan encourages the creation of seven recreational "anchor areas" on 58 miles of the White River through Marion and Hamilton counties.

(July 6, 2019) Because of the attention focused on the Electoral College in the 2016 presidential race - in which the winner did not gain the most popular votes - it may not be surprising that a similar situation unfolded in 1888.

Can you imagine a scenario, though, in which neither major party's presidential candidate actively campaigned?

That's what happened in 1892 - in sharp distinction to the current situation in which intense campaigning is in full swing more than 18 months before voters go to the polls.

Both the 1888 and 1892 campaigns featured Benjamin Harrison of Indianapolis as the Republican candidate for the White House. And both unfolded during an era - stretching from the 1870s through the 1920s - in which Indiana was regarded nationally as a "swing state" in presidential elections.

As evidence: Harrison did not carry his home state in 1892 (a majority of Indiana voters preferred his Democratic opponent, Grover Cleveland), although Harrison, a former U.S. senator from Indiana, won the Hoosier State in 1888. His "front porch campaign" that year - based out of his Italianate home that is now part of the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site at 1200 N. Delaware St. - resulted in scores of souvenir hunters who tore off pieces of the property's wooden fence. Caroline Scott Harrison, who would become the nation's first lady, is said to have remarked: "If we don't go to the White House, we'll go to the poor house, with all of the repairs we'll have to make."

To share insights about colorful and intriguing aspects of Harrison's presidential campaigns, Nelson is joined by Ray Boomhower of the Indiana Historical Society, the author of the new biography Mr. President: A Life of Benjamin Harrison (IHS Press).

Caroline Scott Harrison's battle with tuberculosis - and eventual death in the White House two weeks before the 1892 election - explains why neither candidate campaigned that election cycle. Harrison announced he would not leave his wife's bedside. Out of respect, Cleveland, the eventual winner, also refrained from campaigning.

In contrast, the 1888 campaign - which also featured Harrison against Cleveland - was a lively affair. One of the more memorable publicity ploys: Harrison's supporters built a massive, steel-rigged, canvas ball, covered it with campaign slogans and travelled over 5,000 miles with it to the candidate's Indianapolis home.

Harrison achieved the presidency that year by winning the Electoral College (with 233 votes to 168 for Cleveland), although he lost the popular vote. That was the third of five times in American history in which the loser of the popular vote won the Electoral College - and, as a result, the White House.

Of the six vice presidents who have been elected from Indiana, four of them achieved office during the era when Indiana was considered a swing state in national elections and was therefore courted by both parties. The Hoosier vice presidents during that era include two Democrats - Thomas Hendricks (who was in office for one year only, 1885) and Thomas R. Marshall (who served from 1913-1921) - and two Republicans, Schulyer Colfax (veep from 1869-1873) and Charles Fairbanks(1905-1909).

Ray and Nelson discuss the factors that resulted in Indiana's swing state reputation then, in contrast to its general tendency to support Republicans in national elections in recent decades.

In the 1888 presidential campaign, Benjamin Harrison gave "more than 80 extemporaneous talks to more than 300,000 visitors to Indianapolis" between early July and late October, according to Ray's biography. Marching bands often escorted the delegations of visitors from a city park to the Harrison home on North Delaware Street. Delegations included Union veterans of the Civil War, African-American supporters and railroad workers.

Four years later, some key Republican Party leaders declined to help Harrison. From the start of his presidency, Ray writes, Harrison "stood steadfast … in making sure that qualified individuals - not party stooges - received appointments to key government positions."

Because of Caroline Scott Harrison's illness, the 1892 presidential contest "paled in comparison in every way with the one four years before," according to Mr. President. After she died on Oct. 25, grief-stricken President Harrison accompanied his wife to Indianapolis for her burial at Crown Hill Cemetery. Two weeks later, he lost his bid for re-election, with Cleveland defeating him both in the popular vote and in the Electoral College.

(June 29, 2019) It's a suburban boomtown continually in the spotlight because of developments like the opening in 2017 of the first Ikea store in the state.

So who today would guess that Fishers, located in Hamilton County, had a reputation for lawlessness, gun fights, grave robberies and drunken brawls in the years after it was founded during the 1870s?

To explore the violent early history of Fishers - which shed the designation of town to assume official status as a city only in 2014, after years of explosive growth - Nelson is joined by David Heighway, Hamilton County's historian, in this encore show originally broadcast in 2017. Based on his extensive research, David has several explanations for why the town was so rough-and-tumble in the years after it was founded in 1872.

Even Fishers' nickname of Mudsock has violent origins: a melee known as "the Battle of Mudsock" made national news in 1881, one month after the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Coral(in Arizona) when, according to David, the public was paying close attention to violent incidents.

"If you've seen the movie Tombstone or the TV series Deadwood - that was what Fishers was like," David contends.

He has posted several blog entries about Fisher's violent early years on a weekly blog of the Hamilton East Public Library, where he works in collection services.

Much of the blame for the Wild West early years of Fishers, David says, falls on "the loose political structure of the town," which encouraged lawlessness. As a railroad depot (the community early on was known as Fishers Station), Fishers was located near several towns with strict temperance laws and ordinances.

"So if someone wanted to raise a little hell," David says, "they would go to Fishers." A native Hoosier and a descendant of Indiana pioneers, David is on the board of directors of the Hamilton County Historical Society and serves on the Noblesville Historic Preservation Commission.

According to an article David wrote for the Hamilton County Business Magazine, the Battle of Mudsock in November 1881 was a "community-wide brawl" that left one dead and 32 wounded. A fistfight escalated into an "explosion of violence."

During its early years, lawlessness in Mudsock - i.e. Fishers - persisted in part because the town apparently had few, if any, law enforcement officers, David says.

Grave robbing in the Fishers area circa 1900 was an extension of "body snatching" problems in Indianapolis, which was the epicenter of a major national ring led by Rufus Cantrell, who was known as the "King of the Ghouls."

Cantrell and his accomplices, who may have included a physician born in Hamilton County in 1859, supplied corpses to early medical schools desperate for bodies to use in teaching students. In one of David's blog posts about the grave robbery problems, he describes how Cantrell testified in court against the physician from Hamilton County.

Other crimes in early Fishers included "train wrecking," robberies in which desperadoes placed ties or other obstructions on railroad tracks. When approaching trains would crash or overturn, the criminals would loot the wreckage.

In the 1880s, when the Monon Railroad line opened in the western part of Hamilton County - the opposite end from Fishers - violence in the town began to decline, according to David. He adds, though, that a pool hall located in the back of a Fishers hardware store was demolished by a dynamite explosion in 1914.

"By the end of World War I," he notes, Fishers "had begun to settle into a quiet farming community."