Western Indiana Examples of Small Community Impacts of the Mid - Nineteenth Century Industrial Transition

The Great Lakes Geographer, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2001 1 The area selected for this research includes five western Indiana counties located in the lower Wabash Valley (Figure 1). American settlement began in that area in 1811, and a system of towns soon emerged in which merchants were actively engaged in the river trade to New Orleans. The profits from that trade were used in part to develop a complex of pioneer industries that processed agricultural and forest products and produced the containers and flatboats required to ship the goods. Beginning in 1850 with the arrival of the railroads, the local economic environment changed substantially. For the first time the area manufacturing industries were exposed to both the problems and opportunities of low cost transportation to the north and east. As a result, the research area was linked with the other industrial areas of the Northeast. The purpose of this research was to determine whether or not selected impacts of the midWestern Indiana Examples of Small Community Impacts of the MidNineteenth Century Industrial Transition