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    Danville
    Danville
    Danville
    Ebook184 pages59 minutes

    Danville

    By Jeffrey K. Baldwin and Hendricks County Historical Museum

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    About this ebook

    Danville, created in 1824 as the county seat of Hendricks County, was the hub of government, commerce, and agriculture. Farmers sold their crops in town and shopped there. As the agricultural economy diminished, Danville became home to workers commuting to Indianapolis. Danville residents have always valued education. On May 10, 1878, at the instigation of Prof. W. F. Harper of the Central Normal School of Ladoga, 50 farm wagons from Danville arrived at Ladoga and stole the whole school, including equipment, students, faculty, and baggage. Central Normal College was then installed in the facility previously housing the Hendricks County Seminary and the Danville Academy. From 1878 to 1951, Central Normal College was a Danville institution, turning out more than 75,000 graduates destined for leadership roles in education, business, law, and politics.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439624326
    Danville
    Author

    Jeffrey K. Baldwin

    Jeffrey K. Baldwin is a lifelong resident of Danville and has engaged in the civil practice of law for 30 years. He is currently president of the Friends of the Hendricks County Historical Museum and is involved in numerous other community, church, and political organizations. Baldwin received his law degree from the Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis and his bachelor's degree from Ball State University with majors in political science and history.

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      Book preview

      Danville - Jeffrey K. Baldwin

      book!

      INTRODUCTION

      This book is not intended as a comprehensive history of Danville. This book is intended, however, to highlight some of the people, places, and events that have transpired here as told from the point of view of someone who, other than while away from Danville to attend college, has lived his whole life and raised a family in Danville.

      I started walking to school in first grade. As I ventured away from the street where my home was located I realized that some of the other homes in Danville looked very different from mine, which was a recently built three-bedroom ranch home.

      Many of the homes had two or two and a half stories, several of them had multiple doors, and they looked like places where more than one family could live. As I asked questions I was surprised to find that Danville had once been the home to a college, and that these homes around town were where students lived with the families of Danville.

      As my range expanded I found the vestiges of the college as part of the Danville High School whose east end bore the name of Hargrave Hall. I began to hear stories of the days when Danville had lots of restaurants around the public square and all were full of faculty and students and staff and Danville residents. This was difficult to comprehend as my elementary-aged eyes saw only the Coffee Cup and Waffle House on the square. We were thrilled in the late 1960s to finally get a Burger Chef in Danville! Not only could we get the greatest 15 cent hamburger, but the driveway that circled around was a great way for the teenagers with cars to show how cool they were by buzzing the Burger Chef!

      And so, I discovered, the architecture hints at our history.

      Danville is an amazing town with an amazing history. The purpose of this book is to show some of that history with photographs that I have been able to find that illustrate snapshots of lives of some of the people who have lived here and some of the events that have happened here.

      This book covers the time span of 1824 to yesterday. Danville was created in 1824 to be the county seat of Hendricks County. The site was chosen because the place to be called Danville was near the center of the land that had been set aside to call Hendricks County. And Danville is still important today as the seat of county government in Hendricks County.

      The court was an important place in 1824. By 2009, the number of courts in Hendricks County has multiplied to a circuit court and five superior courts, and three towns in the county have town courts. Perhaps even more important are all the other offices that have come to be involved in county government. I suspect that hundreds of people deal with county government every week.

      But surrounding this small center of government agriculture developed. The farmers needed a place to sell their surplus crops and get them to a market, and there was a necessity to have a place to buy the things that they needed on the farm that they could not make for themselves. Therefore, commerce developed around the courthouse square.

      An 1865 map of the town of Danville available on Hendricks County’s Web site lists the businesspeople of Danville at the time. They included three medical doctors; a dentist; five grocers; seven lawyers; a druggist; a newspaper publisher; at least two manufacturers and dealers in boots and shoes; a tanner and dealer in hides and leathers; a carpenter; a plasterer; a photographer; a hotel proprietor; two millers; a woolen factory; a marble (tombstone) dealer; an undertaker (who also manufactured furniture and chairs); a dealer in stoves, tin, copper, iron, and hardware; a pastor; a livery stable owner; a builder and repairer of carriages; a postmaster and book store owner; a dealer in all kinds of stock, including livestock; a dealer and manufacturer of harness and saddlery; a resident farmer; and the collector of internal revenue. Much has changed today!

      In 1865, most of the businesses were on the courthouse square on the streets surrounding the courthouse or within close proximity. In 2009, Danville has spread out considerably, especially to the east and west along the present U.S. Highway 36.

      Very few of the businesses that served a very self-sufficient horse-drawn community are even in existence today, let alone existing in the middle of town. Tombstones can be bought in town, but there is no public place to peruse your purchase other than the east or south cemeteries.

      Krogers is in its third building since leaving the courthouse square in my youth, and it is far east of the downtown. IGA survived on the south side of the square until it had a fire and it, too, built a building on the outskirts of town to the west. It is no longer in existence at all. As modes of transportation changed and as the country changed, Danville changed too.

      The reader should be able to get a glimpse of understanding of Danville today by looking carefully at its past, much of which is preserved in bits and pieces throughout the community. The business fronts on the courthouse square downtown have changed many times, but similarities can still be seen to those of years ago.

      Several years ago I was at a national meeting of the Circus Historical Society. One of the renowned scholars of the organization asked me where I was from. Upon being told he immediately inquired as to whether I knew of John Hanson Craig, a resident of Danville, who at one time was the heaviest man alive and appeared with the circus.

      Upon learning that I did know of Craig,

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