🏁Indiana

The Hoosier State

Indiana is the Midwestern heart of American manufacturing and motor racing. Indianapolis is home to the largest single-day sporting event in the world — the Indianapolis 500 — and the state's university basketball culture is second only to Kentucky's. The origin of the word "Hoosier" remains a genuine mystery that linguists have debated for two centuries.

Territory to Statehood

The region was part of the Northwest Territory created by the Ordinance of 1787. Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederacy fiercely resisted American settlement; William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumseh's forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Indiana became a state in 1816 as a free state, matching Mississippi's admission the following year as a slave state to preserve sectional balance.

Lincoln's Boyhood

Abraham Lincoln spent 14 formative years in Indiana — from ages 7 to 21 — on a farm near Little Pigeon Creek in Spencer County. His mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln died there of milk sickness in 1818 and is buried in what is now the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. Lincoln himself wrote that "here I grew up."

The Indianapolis 500

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, built in 1909, hosts the Indianapolis 500 every Memorial Day weekend. Inaugurated in 1911 and now in its second century, the 500-mile race regularly draws more than 300,000 spectators in person — the largest single-day attendance at any sporting event in the world. The track's bricks at the start-finish line earned the venue its nickname, "The Brickyard."

Manufacturing and Basketball

Indiana has one of the highest proportions of manufacturing employment of any state — steel at the Gary lakefront, RV production at Elkhart, pharmaceuticals at Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly. High school basketball is a cultural institution; the 1954 Milan High School team of 161 students that won the state championship inspired the 1986 film Hoosiers.

Indiana Facts

• The origin of "Hoosier" remains unresolved — theories range from "Who's yere?" (who's there) to a regional contractor named Hoosier to British dialect.
• Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan became the country's 61st national park in 2019.
• Indianapolis is the second-largest city in the Midwest after Chicago.
• The tomato juice was invented in French Lick, Indiana, in 1917.
• The state produces about one-fifth of the country's popcorn.

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