Pictures of Adopted Hoosiers

Comedian Herb Shriner famously said, "I wasn't born in Indiana but I moved there as soon as I heard about it." He wasn't alone. Since its beginnings, the Hoosier State has been a destination for pioneers, settlers, refugees, migrants, escaped and manumitted slaves, industrial workers, and just plain, ordinary farmers, workers, artists, and others. Early on, people must have sensed that nothing better would await them beyond the rich and generous lands of Indiana. And so they stayed.

Johnny Appleseed was an adopted Hoosier. Born John Chapman on September 26, 1774, he was a native of Leominster, Massachusetts. Like Abraham Lincoln a generation later, he was orphaned with the death of his mother. His father remarried. Later in life, the elder Chapman pulled up stakes and moved to Ohio. Johnny had gone west before him, first to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio. It was in Ohio that John Chapman earned his nickname, Johnny Appleseed.

Johnny Appleseed lived a long life. In his later days, he lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that's where he died after reaching his allotted threescore and ten. Johnny's end came on March 18, 1845. He was buried in Fort Wayne, though no one knows exactly where.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was probably the most famous adopted Hoosier. He was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809. In the fall of 1816, when Abe was just seven years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851), moved his young family to what was then the Indiana Territory. Not long after, on December 11, 1816, Indiana became a state. Like Johnny Appleseed before him, Abe Lincoln's mother and a younger brother died when he was young. Nancy Hanks Lincoln (1784-1818) lies buried in Indiana, near her Spencer County home. Her son said of her, "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

Abe Lincoln spent his formative years in the Hoosier State, raised there by his parents and his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln (1788-1869). In March 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois. He had just turned twenty-one. Kentucky and Illinois have their claims upon the Great Emancipator, but Indiana has its claim, too. I might be biased, but I would call it equal.

In 1964, Scholastic Books published a children's biography, Johnny Appleseed, written by Eva Moore and illustrated by Judith Ann Lawrence. Born in 1942, Eva Moore lives or has lived in Montauk, New York. Also known as J.A. Lawrence and Judy Blish, Judith Ann Lawrence is an author and an artist. She was married to the science fiction author James Blish (1921-1975). Judy has a new book out. You can find out more about it by clicking here.

In 1948, Walt Disney released Melody Time, an animated musical featuring seven short films. One of these is "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed."  I had hoped to find a Hoosier, either native or adopted, who contributed to "Johnny Appleseed," but to no avail. In any case, Simon and Schuster published a children's book adaptation in 1949. It was printed by Western Printing and Lithographing Company as one of its Little Golden Library series. The pictures were by the Walt Disney Company. (There might be a Hoosier hiding in there somewhere.) The adaptation was by Ted Parmalee, about whom I know nothing at all. 

Here's an interior illustration from Disney's Johnny Appleseed. This is romanticized of course, but not by much. If you have been in Appalachia and to the American Midwest, you might have seen scenes like this one. We had a storm just like it yesterday.

Rand McNally & Company of Chicago had its own line of children's books, including those in the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club series. Here is one called Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance, written by Frances Cavanah, illustrated by Paula Hutchison, and published in 1959. I have cleaned up the image a little, as the original I have is a little worn. I found this and the two books above on Johnny Appleseed at the local secondhand store about three weeks ago.

Frances Cavanah was a Hoosier. She was born on September 26, 1897, in Princeton, Indiana, to Rufus Oscar Cavanah and Louella "Lula" Neale Cavanah. Educated at DePauw University, she worked as an editor at Child Life magazine in Chicago. (Sometimes people come to Indiana, and sometimes they go away from it.) Frances wrote dozens of books and lived in Washington, D.C., later in life. She died in May 1982.

The illustrator, Paula A. Hutchison, was born on December 19, 1902, in Helena, Montana. She worked as a teacher, illustrator, and fine artist. She was married to Michael John McGrath (1905-?) and lived in New Jersey. She illustrated many children's books, most of which seem to be biographies and other nonfiction. Paula died on November 5, 1982.

In the fall of 1816, Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Kentucky to Indiana. Part of the reason for the move was for him to get away from some land disputes, but part was also to relocate to what would soon be a free state versus the slave state of Kentucky. Making the trip with him were his wife Nancy and their two children, Sarah and Abe. That made Abe's sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby (1807-1828), an adopted Hoosier, too. The illustration is from Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance.

The endpapers of Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance together make this map of Lincoln Country. Plum in the middle is an image of Pigeon Creek Farm, the place in what is now Spencer County where Abe spent his childhood years, from age seven to age twenty-one. Here he was formed and here his mother lies.

Original text copyright 2021, 2204 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana's Fifth First Lady

Today is the first day of Indiana's bicentennial year, so Happy Birth Year to the Hoosier State!

Awhile back, I wrote about Jonathan Jennings (1784-1834), first governor of Indiana. Unfortunately, there isn't any known likeness of his wife, Ann Gilmore Hay Jennings (1792-1825). In fact, there aren't any extant images of Indiana's first four first ladies, at least in the book First Ladies of Indiana and The Governors, 1816-1984 by Margaret Moore Post (1984). The first for whom we have a portrait is Catherine Stull Van Swearingen Noble, shown below. It's the only drawing or painting of a first lady in the book, thus the only work of an artist who was not also a photographer.

Catherine Stull Van Swearingen, called Kitty, was born on August 23, 1801, presumably at her father's plantation at Berryville, Virginia. Her parents were Eli Van Swearingen, a wealthy banker, and Ann (Noble) Van Swearingen. On November 8, 1819, at age eighteen, Kitty married her cousin, Noah Noble (1794-1844), in a Virginia church. Despite the difference in their ages, they had played together as children. Kitty then considered Noah to be "on the bossy side and told him so." (1) After marrying, the two traveled together by horseback to Brookville, Indiana, where Noble had previously been in business. With them were part of Kitty's dowry, what Margaret Moore Post perhaps euphemistically called "black servants." Jonathan Jennings and the first Indiana constitutional convention had ensured that Indiana would be a staunchly free state. The disposition of Kitty's "servants" is unknown, although her husband later provided for former slaves from his father's estate. More on that below.

Noah Noble was made a colonel in the state militia in 1820, the same year in which he was elected sheriff of Franklin County, of which Brookville is the seat of government. In 1823, he was collector of county and state revenue, in 1824 county lister (or assessor). That same year, 1824, Noble was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives. In 1826, he became receiver of public monies in the Indianapolis land office and relocated to the young capital city where he lived the rest of his life.

In the 1820s and perhaps into the 1830s, Noble assembled a large tract of land just east of Indianapolis in what is now the neighborhood of Holy Cross Catholic Church. The boundaries of what was then the Noble farm are College Avenue (then called Noble Avenue) on the west, Arsenal Avenue on the east, St. Clair Avenue on the north, and Washington Street on the south. (2) That figures to about 300 acres in all, an area now occupied by houses and businesses and by about fifteen acres of the grounds of Arsenal Technical High School. There may not be any traces in the area of the Noble family or their presence except for a couple of place names and, if the stories are accurate, an old oak tree, said to have been planted by Kitty Noble in what is now Highland Park. (3)

The Noble house, called Liberty Hall, was a large and very fine house located on Market Street near Pine Street. The ceilings were twelve feet high. Eight fireplaces warmed the bottom floor. A dozen Gordon setters roamed its halls. On the grounds were a vineyard, a peach orchard, an apple orchard, and a sugar grove. The governor and his wife were renowned for their hospitality.

Their entertaining was famous all over the country [wrote the Indianapolis Star in 1964] and invitations to the Noble soirees were greatly sought after. While Kitty was First Lady she entertained at long tables set with rare imported china and silver brought with her as a bride from Virginia. She wore a set of five matching coral cameos presented to "my beloved Kitty" by the Governor with her gowns of damask and velvet. (4)

Kitty Noble bore four children, of which only two, Catherine Mary Noble (1822-1851) and Winston Park Noble (1834-1899), survived to adulthood. "Kitty Noble is said to have spent much time training her daughter and son in duties and manners," wrote Margaret Moore Post, "and the children dressed for dinner each evening." (p. 25) A friend remembered Kitty as "always having a spirit of adventure tempered by a desire for a serious home life and deep rooted Christian faith." (5)

In 1831, Noah Noble's sister, Lavenia Noble Vance (1804-1885), sent former slaves from their father's estate into Noble's care. They were the Magruder family, old Tom, his wife Sarah, and then or later their children, Moses and Louisa. (6) Noble built a cabin for them on his farm in Indianapolis, at the northeast corner of what is now College Avenue and Market Street. A roundabout story leads from Tom Magruder and his cabin to one of the most important novels in American history.

From 1839 to 1847, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was a minister of the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis. He lived at New Jersey and Market streets, only three blocks west of the Magruder cabin. Beecher was a frequent visitor there and at Liberty Hall. He officiated at the wedding of Catherine Mary Noble to Alexander H. Davidson in 1840. He also spoke at the memorial service of Noah Noble at his death in 1844. In his sermons, he was said to have mentioned Tom Magruder and his deep faith.

Beecher's sister, the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), visited with her brother during his sojourn in Indianapolis. She is supposed to have met Tom and his family, as well. A strong case can be made that she based the characters from her book Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), at least in part, on them. A decade after the book, a bestseller, was published, its author met President Abraham Lincoln, who is supposed to have said to her, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" The story is considered apocryphal. If it were true in any way, we might say that the origins of the Civil War were in Indianapolis, in the area of what is now a nondescript gray brick-and-block building and its parking lot at College and Market. There isn't even a historical plaque to mark the spot where Tom Magruder's cabin once stood.

Noah Noble, a Whig, was elected Indiana's fifth governor in 1831 and served until the end of his second term in 1837. Noble continued in public service after leaving office. His name became associated with disastrous public debt and he returned to private life in 1841. Noah Noble died on February 8, 1844. His wife survived him by thirty years and passed away at age seventy-three on July 12, 1874. Both lie now in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. Some of their household furnishings were sent to the Wylie House in Bloomington, Indiana. Noble County, Indiana, is named in his honor.

As for the artist who painted the portrait of Catherine Stull Van Swearingen Noble above, his or her identity is unknown. The image is a scan from Margaret Moore Post's book from 1984. It was probably copied from a photograph that appeared in the Indianapolis Star twenty years before. The caption of that photograph says that the portrait was painted in 1820 and was supposed to have been "an excellent likeness." It does not identify the artist. If the portrait was painted in 1820, it seems unlikely that it was done in Indiana. In a quick search of Pioneer Painters of Indiana by Wilbur D. Peat (1954), I didn't come up with a candidate, as the state was yet so young as to have had few portraitists of sufficient skill. Cincinnati, Kentucky, or even Virginia seem more likely places for its execution. The caption doesn't give the location of the painting, either. It may now be in the collections of Indiana University. I hope that it hasn't been lost, and I hope that someday soon we'll know the name of the artist.

Notes

(1) From "Indiana's Fifth First Lady Grew Up on Virginia Plantation" by Mary Waldon, Indianapolis Star, April 19, 1964, p. 102.

(2) Another source says that the northern boundary of the farm was the present-day New York Street. That would make the Noble property significantly smaller than 300 acres.

(3) St. Clair Avenue was probably named for the St. Clair family, who were connected to the Noble family by the marriage of Lavenia Noble, daughter of Dr. Thomas Noble (1762-1817) and Elizabeth Claire Sedgwick Noble (1764-1830 or 1837) and sister of Noah Noble, to Arthur St. Clair Vance (1801-1849), grandson of Major General Arthur St. Clair II (1737-1818) of Revolutionary War fame. It's worth noting that a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin is named Augustine St. Clare. Some names in the book match up with real-life people connected to the Noble and Magruder families.
Highland Avenue and Highland Park were apparently named for Highland Home, the residence of the Nobles' daughter, Catherine Mary Noble Davidson, and her husband, Alexander H. Davidson. The house was built after the death of Noah Noble. Highland Park, at New York Street and Highland Avenue, now occupies the site of the house, which was torn down in 1898 or shortly thereafter. Alternatively, the home was named after a place already called Highland, situated as it is at an elevation of about 750 feet above sea level and offering a view of the city to the west, which is as much as 45 to 50 feet lower in elevation.

(4) From Waldon in the Indianapolis Star.

(5) Ditto.
(6) The case of Tom Magruder is somewhat confused in that, according to a page on the website of the Indiana Historical Society, a Thomas Megruder, who had a son named Moses, was a slave kept by a James Noble of Dearborn County, Indiana. According to that page, Megruder "remained in the county until Noble's widow died. At that time, Noah Noble, who later became an Indiana governor, gave Megruder his freedom. One of Megruder's sons, Moses, was among those who founded the AME church on Lake Street in Lawrenceburg during the early 1850s." Another document, authored by Allan M. Stranz of the Federal Writers' Project and dated December 29, 1937 (click for a link), would seem to clear up the confusion:
James Noble (1785-1831) was the older brother of Noah Noble, a resident of Lawrenceburg in Dearborn County, a member of the first state constitutional convention, the first U.S. Senator from Indiana, and a prosecutor in the Fall Creek Massacre case. James Noble died in Washington, D.C., in 1831, the same year in which Lavenia Noble Vance sent Tom Magruder and his family to Indianapolis. (The death date of James Noble's wife, Mary Lindsay Noble, is unknown. There seems to be confusion in this case between her and James Noble's mother, Elizabeth Claire Sedgwick Noble, or between James Noble and one of those two women.) The Noble family may have continued to hold the Magruder family as slaves in Kentucky up to that time. According to Allan M. Stranz, "When the widow of Thomas Noble died in 1837 [sic], the [Noble] children agreed among themselves to set the old couple free." The date 1837 may not be correct for the death of Elizabeth Claire Sedgwick Noble. If it was instead 1830, as other sources indicate, then the date for the relocation of Tom and Sarah Magruder to Indianapolis in 1831 fits. Still, it indicates that the Noble family, residents of Indiana, still held slaves as late as 1831. The Magruders were by law the property of Thomas and Elizabeth Noble's daughters: in Dr. Noble's will, the real property had gone to his sons, the personal property, including slaves, to his daughters. Nevertheless, James and Noah Noble, both Whigs and both officeholders in Indiana, a free state, were uncomfortably close to an institution they supposedly abhorred. Today that would make for a scandal of gigantic proportions. 
For more on Thomas Megruder, see the website of the Indiana Historical Society, here. For more on Senator James Noble, see: "James Noble" by Nina K. Reid in The Indiana Quarterly Magazine of History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Mar. 1913), pp. 1-13, here.

Noah Noble, a portrait by Jacob Cox from before 1840. Born in 1810 in Philadelphia, Cox arrived in Indianapolis in 1833 and opened a portrait studio in 1835. In all, he painted six portraits of Indiana governors. Cox died in 1892.

I had hoped to find an illustration of Uncle Tom's Cabin done by an Indiana artist--but no luck. Instead, I'll show the cover of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Children, adapted by Helen Ring Robinson (1878-1923), designed by W. M. Rhoads (note the cutout on the cover), and illustrated by at least two artists, one named H.S. Adams, another named Allender. The book was published in Philadelphia by The Penn Publishing Company in 1908.

According to an article in an Indianapolis newspaper of the 1850s, a daguerrotype of the original Magruder cabin was taken before the cabin was "removed." Any daguerrotype has failed to turn up, and the exact meaning of the word removed is unknown--was it torn down, or could someone taking the long view have attempted to save it for posterity? (Source: "Indianapolis Then and Now: Louisa Magruder’s House, 564 N. Highland Avenue" by Joan Hostetler at the website Historic Indianapolis.com, November 21, 2013, accessible by clicking here.)

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Pioneers-Transportation

Today the Hoosier State of Indiana enters its two-hundreth year, for on December 11, 1816, it was admitted to the Union as the nineteenth state. Of the forty-eight contiguous states, Indiana is the smallest located west of the Appalachians. Nonetheless, it has made outsized contributions to the nation's culture and history, being first, most, and only in many categories, including agriculture, military service, manufacturing, automobiles, aviation, space exploration, education, literature, and art.

Ours is a state of pioneers. Whether in a flatboat, covered wagon, airplane, or spacecraft, Hoosiers have led the way. In observance of Indiana's pioneering efforts in transportation, I offer a number of illustrations by an artist who was herself descended from Indiana pioneers, Clotilde Embree Funk (1893-1991) of Princeton.

Postscript: The New York Times has cited my biographical article on Clotilde Embree Funk. The Times' article is called "Draw, She Said," and the author is David W. Dunlap. Mr. Dunlap's article is dated December 9, 2015, and it includes a photograph of Clotilde. In her hand is what Rooster Cogburn would have called "a big horse pistol." Believe it or not, when the picture was taken in 1926, Clotilde was target shooting in the basement of the Times Tower.

Happy Bison-tennial, Indiana!

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln by John Tinney McCutcheon

One hundred fifty years ago today, an assassin shot Abraham Lincoln as he was watching a play in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Carried across the street, Abe died early the next morning. His shooter likewise fell with a bullet to the head eleven days later.

The Civil War had effectively come to a close only a few days before the president was shot, when General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to General U.S. Grant's Union Army at Appomattox. The war had begun a little over a month after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. The official end to the insurrection came a little less than a month after his death. This season, we are busy observing the sesquicentennial of the end of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans perished so that millions more might be free.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. He was the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, their daughter Sarah Lincoln, born in 1807, being the first. The Lincolns were what might be described, perhaps in a condescending manner, as poor. The conditions of their lives became the subject of John T. McCutcheon's cartoon of February 12, 1929, shown above.

Abe Lincoln--nicknamed "Honest Abe" and "The Railsplitter" and "The Great Emancipator"--was born in Kentucky but spent his formative years in Indiana. His mother died there and lies buried in Indiana soil. John Tinney McCutcheon, the cartoonist, was also a Hoosier. He came into the world on a farm near South Raub on May 6, 1870, about halfway through Reconstruction and only three months after the Fifteenth Amendment, the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments, was ratified. His father, John Barr McCutcheon, had fought in the Civil War. The younger McCutcheon, known as the dean of American cartoonists for his longevity, died on June 10, 1949.

John T. McCutcheon drew his cartoon in observance of Abe Lincoln's birth. His commentary is thick with irony. Lincoln rose up from his humble origins to be one of our greatest presidents and one of the greatest men in American history. In this anniversary week of the surrender at Appomattox and the death of the president, I would rather celebrate his life than mourn his death, a life that began in a backwoods Kentucky cabin and against any odds made by poverty or disadvantage, which proved to be of no great significance at all.

Abraham Lincoln's life began with unlimited potential, as all lives do. The irony in the cartoon is that the Lincolns' new baby--despite his birth into humility and poverty--would go on to preside over a nation at war against a great moral evil, the defining moral issue of the nineteenth century in America. There is an added irony in that McCutcheon's cartoon--without his intent or awareness--also touches on the great moral issue of our day, an issue with more than a few parallels to slavery.


In February 1862, at about the time of Abe's fifty-third birthday, The Atlantic Monthly printed Julia Ward Howe's lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The first stanza and the first refrain end with the same words: "His truth is marching on." Abraham Lincoln carried the banner of truth. He has fallen, but we can take up that banner and carry it forward, and those after us can do the same. With or without us, truth will, nonetheless, march on.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Bison-tennial!

We're still a year and a half away from the beginning of Indiana's bicentennial year, but I would like to be among the first to make the connection between that celebration and the Indiana State Seal, which includes the image of an American bison, and to say:

Happy Bison-tennial, Indiana!

The Seal of the State of Indiana, a design proposed before Indiana was a state. Only two other states--Kansas and North Dakota--include the image of a bison on their state seals. Both were admitted to the Union after Indiana. That will make the Hoosier State the first to observe a bison-tennial. By the way, whoever designed the seal is a candidate for the first illustrator to call Indiana home.

Update (Mar. 30, 2015): As it turns out, I was not the first to make the connection between the state seal and the bicentennial, but my wishes are the same. Also, there are some who believe that William Henry Harrison created the seal, modified from the original seal of the old Northwest Territory.

Text and caption copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln in Indiana

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and lived as an adult in Illinois, but his formative years were spent in what is now Spencer County, Indiana. Young Abe arrived in Indiana in the autumn of 1816, not long before the territory became a state. He was then just seven years old. When he was nine, Abe's mother died of milk sickness, a mysterious disease we now know is caused when cow's milk is poisoned by white snakeroot. Abraham Lincoln of course went on to be a lawyer, a U.S. representative, and, as the first Republican president, the Great Emancipator and the savior of the Union. He wrote: "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother--blessings on her memory." Nancy Hanks Lincoln lies buried in Hoosier soil, near her home on Little Pigeon Creek.

I recently found three books on Indiana history and Abraham Lincoln. I would like to show three illustrations from those books, each by an illustrator previously unknown to me either as an illustrator or by name. Two have birthdays coming up next month.

"A Typical Pioneer Scene" by the Brown County artist Marie Goth. Born in Indianapolis on August 15, 1887, Jessie Marie Goth was educated at Manual Training High School and the Herron School of Art in her home city. Her teachers included fellow Hoosiers William Merle Allison, Harry E. Wood, and William Merritt Chase. Marie also taught art, but she is best known for her portraits. She was in fact the first woman to paint an official portrait of an Indiana governor (Henry F. Schricker). Her younger sister Genevieve, also an artist, married an artist, Carl C. Graf. Marie Goth was otherwise connected by blood or association with artists of the Hoosier Group and among the artists' colony in Brown County, Indiana. Her longtime companion was the artist Veraldo J. Cariani (1891-1969).

The drawing here is from Historic Indiana by Julia Henderson Levering (1916). In his youth, Abraham Lincoln would have lived in a cabin like this one. He also worked on a ferry boat and a flatboat, making a trip to New Orleans in the 1820s. In 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois, leaving his Indiana home behind. By coincidence, Marie Goth lived in a log house in Brown County. She, too, fell victim to poison when she was bitten by a brown recluse spider in the autumn of 1974. In her weakened state, she fell down the steps of her home and died on January 9, 1975.

In 1927, The Indiana Lincoln Union put out a booklet called Lincoln the Hoosier, written by Charles Garrett Vannest and illustrated by a youthful Constance Forsyth. Born in Indianapolis on August 18, 1903, Constance Forsyth was the daughter of artists Alice Atkinson Forsyth and William Forsyth. Like her father, Constance was renowned as a painter and teacher. Her résumé runs to hundreds of items (education, exhibitions, prizes and honors, holdings in museums, teaching career, etc.). One highlight of her career was her assistance to Thomas Hart Benton in his completion of the murals for the Indiana Building at the Century of Progress Exposition, the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. Lincoln the Hoosier was the first of two books she illustrated, the other being The Friends by Esther Buffler (1951). Constance Forsyth died on January 22, 1987, in Austin, Texas.

This map of Lincoln home sites is in a second booklet called Abraham Lincoln: A Concise Biography, published in 1934 by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne. The mapmaker was Noble Brainard, also of Fort Wayne. (The image reproduced in the booklet shows only part of Brainard's original design. The image above is from the Internet.)

Noble Eyck Brainard was born on September 3, 1893, in Buda, Illinois. Like Marie Goth and Constance Forsyth, he was a teacher. For a time he lived in New Mexico, but he also worked as a civil servant in the Philippines and in Fort Wayne, where he resided from the 1920s on. Brainard married Amelia Zichgraf in 1924 in Fort Wayne. The copyright date on the map above is 1933. Brainard died on October 28, 1956, and is buried in his adopted home city. For years, Fort Wayne was home to the Lincoln Museum, one of the largest collections related to Abraham Lincoln in the United States. In 2008, shortly before Abe's bicentennial, the Lincoln Financial Foundation, holder of the collection, donated it to the Indiana State Library and the Allen County Public Library.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The First Art School in Indiana

No one can say for sure who was the first Indiana artist, illustrator, or cartoonist. However, in a book called American Pioneer Arts and Artists (1942), the author, Carl W. Drepperd, is unequivocal about the date, place, and founder of the Hoosier State's first school of art:

At New Harmony, Indiana, William McClure opened the first school for drawing, painting, engraving and lithography in the state, 1826. Charles Alexander [sic] Lesueur was the art teacher at the New Harmony School, 1826 to 1837.

William McClure (1763-1840) was a Scottish-born geologist, cartographer, merchant, and educator. He is known as "the father of American geology." If a map is an illustration, then McClure might be considered one of the earliest of Indiana illustrators. He made a geological map of the United States published in 1809 and 1817. In the mid 1820s, he settled in Robert Owen's Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, and established a school for adults. Charles Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846), the art teacher at New Harmony, was a French artist and naturalist and a friend of William McClure. He also served as a kind of unofficial artist of the New Harmony experiment. Also in residence at New Harmony was David Dale Owen (1807-1860), son of Robert Owen and a geologist and artist.

The community at New Harmony received visitors in the winter of 1832-1833 in the persons of  Prinz Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied (1782-1867), a German aristocrat, explorer, naturalist, and ethnologist, and the artist Johann Carl Bodmer, better known Karl Bodmer (1809-1893). Bodmer was a painter, graphic artist, and illustrator. His work as such would place him in a category as one of Indiana's first illustrators, along with McClure, Lesueur, and Robert Dale Owen.

In his book, Drepperd mentions another early art school within a "female seminary" (the Monroe County Female Academy), located in Bloomington and maintained by Cornelius Pering from 1832 to 1849. Pering, an English-born educator, was born in 1806 and died in 1881.

Mollusks and zoophytes, drawn by Charles Alexandre Lesueur, one of the first Indiana illustrators. This drawing is from 1807, prior to Lesueur's arrival in the Hoosier State.

A drawing of the eastern quoll or eastern native cat (Dasyurus viverrinus), an Australian marsupial, also by Lesueur (date unknown).

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley