Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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of the twentieth century, the Ball Brothers glass jar company had become one of the top employers in Muncie and made the brothers among the richest men in the state. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
In this era, Muncie’s development followed the enduring pattern of the walking city.10 It was a replicable grid of streets, and only a few dozen blocks were accessible from the center of the city—those that could be reached on foot, with a horse-drawn vehicle, or those along the two main railroad lines connecting Muncie to the rest of the state and region. The Fort Wayne, Muncie, and Cincinnati Railroad ran north and south through Muncie with a jog in the middle of town. The Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis (CCC&I) rail line slashed from the northeast to the southwest across the city. Development clustered between the CCC&I lines and the White River to the north, although a few developments followed along the railroads and trailed the north–south line beyond the southern edge of town.
The mass industrialization of Muncie led to a population boom, growing levels of wealth and leisure, and ambition on the part of city boosters to rank as a leading Indiana city. Industrial development over the thirty-year period following the gas strike grew south of the city’s rail lines. Working-class housing on the city’s new south side accompanied this growth. It doubled the geographical size of Muncie in the first decade of the century, matching the growing population, which roughly doubled in the same period.
The business class leading the new manufacturing companies established their homes in the East End, a neighborhood just outside the central business district. This residential area offered easy access to Muncie’s downtown, where residents could visit the city’s leading banks, newspapers, and civic institutions, or could board trains at the station to take them to Indianapolis or Chicago.11 The East End also kept business leaders near the city’s south side, where they could supervise the operations of their factories. Journalist Emily Kimbrough was born in 1899 and grew up on East Washington Street in Muncie’s elite section. At midcentury she wrote for the New Yorker and coauthored a best-selling memoir, but as a child she was part of a wealthy industrial family. Her book about her childhood recounts the appearance of automobiles in the city shortly after 1900 and her joyride around town in the city’s first car. The trip included the rural outskirts of the city but never went as far south as Industry, the city’s main working-class neighborhood.12 Much of that farmland surrounding Muncie would be built up in the next few decades, not least owing to the success of companies like the Indiana Bridge Company, run by Kimbrough’s father. By Indiana standards, the city was becoming an industrial juggernaut.
Philanthropic Interest in Education
In investing in the Normal School, the Ball brothers were following a trend established by the country’s leading industrialists and philanthropists. Business leaders and Progressive Era reformers promoted education amid industrial growth, investing some of their surplus capital for the broader social good and working to mitigate class strife in labor relations. Higher education, especially, built upon new natural and social scientific knowledge and incorporated it into emerging fields of public and business administration. Andrew Carnegie created the Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University) to provide immigrants and working-class residents with engineering and mechanical training. John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to help found the University of Chicago. Leland Stanford of the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads commemorated his late son by founding the Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto, California. Carnegie made a broader appeal to his wealthy counterparts on behalf of higher education in his essays “The Gospel of Wealth” and “The Best Fields for Philanthropy.” In these widely read pieces, he suggested that the founding of a university stands “apart by itself” as the highest end of a lifetime of work and wealth accumulation.13
Real-estate profits were part and parcel to the development of educational opportunity, even from the founding of many institutions. Retail magnate Marshall Field joined John D. Rockefeller in donating to the University of Chicago, giving ten acres of Hyde Park land to it in 1890. He sold the university additional land a year later and then profited by selling more land holdings to the faculty, staff, and others attracted to living near a well-endowed institution on a picturesque campus.14 Real-estate entrepreneurs Harold and Edwin Janss made a similar calculus in Los Angeles in 1924, selling the University of California hundreds of acres at bargain prices, thereby increasing the value of their nearby residential real-estate developments. The University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the University of California’s original Berkeley campus all benefited from similar donations.15
The Ball brothers, in a sense, made good on an older real-estate gambit that brought higher education to Muncie. A group of local businessmen calling themselves the Eastern Indiana Normal University Association (EINUA) had optioned a tract of agricultural land beyond the northwestern borders of Muncie in 1898. The EINUA included, among others, George McCulloch, the city’s leading transportation entrepreneur, and Frank Haimbaugh, publisher of the Muncie Herald. The growth coalition subdivided the land into three hundred lots and platted a development they called Normal City.16 At the edge of this land, they founded the normal school to train young men and women to be teachers in rural schools. Their plan called for the sale of the residential lots to pay for development of the school’s campus, based on an expected student body of 250. The EINUA projected the school to bring $75,000 of student and institutional spending to Muncie annually, a meaningful spur to the city’s economy.17 The Muncie Citizen’s Street Railway Company, led by McCulloch, extended a streetcar line out to the new school, connecting Normal City to Muncie’s downtown.18 The Eastern Indiana Normal University was thus a mechanism for both rural and urban development. By training teachers to educate children in rural districts, the school would provide for the enrichment of rural life. By expanding the city’s reach to outlying agricultural lands and increasing economic activity, the school would help the city grow, provide jobs, and improve human welfare.
The association created EINU as a for-profit enterprise. This proved an unorthodox choice that presaged nearly twenty years of fiscal tumult. For-profit institutions were part of the broad range of higher-education opportunities in the era, but they largely did not share the social responsibility and ambitions of nonprofit private and public colleges.19 EINU began to offer classes in 1899 in an impressive neoclassical building (Figure 3). The handsome brick structure could not guarantee its success, however. The school paired suburban development with educational growth, but the institution foundered, lacking students and prestige. The institution failed and was resurrected three times in the next eighteen years. In one unsuccessful scheme to reorganize the institution, representatives of the EINUA tried to convince leaders of nearby Taylor University to relocate to Muncie.20 Taylor administrators demurred, and after its third bankruptcy, the Muncie school could find no new backers.21
Figure 3. Eastern Indiana Normal University Administration Building. A real-estate scheme financed the founding of Eastern Indiana Normal University, including construction of its administration building. The building still serves as the administration headquarters for Ball State University. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
After the institution failed for the last time in 1917, an Indiana court ordered liquidation to repay the school’s creditors. The assets were worth more than $400,000 and included the administration building, a wood-frame dormitory for women, and about seventy acres of land. The creditors sought to recoup their investment with a plan to break up the properties and sell the land as individual parcels to the highest bidders.22
By that point, hundreds of residents lived in the suburban settlements of Normal City and Riverside. Alva Kitselman, the city’s second leading industrialist, was the most prominent resident of the area. He moved from a house near downtown and built a twenty-six-acre estate the size of a city block in 1915, just three blocks from the east edge of the campus. Around his estate, an array of industrial