[MUSIC] ANNCR: From the WIBQ Newsroom, I'm Frank Rush.

Here's a check of what's making news.

Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett and the City Council continued their work on the 2017 budget in a meeting that lasted forabout two hours last night.

The mayor proposed cuts to five different departments, including motor vehicle highway, transit, parks and recreation, wastewater treatment, and the fire department.

The proposed cuts total about -- WOMAN: Terre Haute is a big town in a small body.

I've looked at a lot of different cities through traveling, and have always felt that Terre Haute was a really good place to live.

MAN: I would describe us as a blue-collar town with a lot of upsides.

There's a lot of reasons to call this place unique and a good place to live.

MAN: Terre Haute is a strong community with good people that has somehow survived years of economic setbacks.

WOMAN: It's a town where the people show their true grit and they prevail.

I think it's a surviving town.

MAN: I really see Terre Haute as a blue-collar town, kinda roll up your sleeves, go to work, put your time in, and come home.

Folks who believe in the fundamentals of hard work and family and faith.

Being good neighbors.

Shakespeare said, "The people are the city," and that is so true.

Not all the accomplishments and the buildings and the statues.

It's the people that you deal with every day.

WOMAN: Terre Haute is a refuge.

It's a safe place.

It's like a security blanket.

[BAND PLAYING] MAN: It's a paradox.

It's a blue-collar town which was founded by a bunch of people who became millionaires.

[MUSIC] We want you to understand this community that you live in, and we want you to appreciate where we've been, because then, it can give you some inspiration of where we need to go.

[MUSIC] McCORMICK: I think we have to tell that story.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] McCORMICK: The Miami Indian name of the river that we now know as the Wabash was Wabashiki.

The French and British settlers had some difficulty pronouncing that, and they shortened it.

Ultimately it ended up "Wabash."

Spelled several different ways, by the way.

The French felt that the rivers needed to have a little bit of class to them, so to speak, and they renamed the rivers by saints.

And they called the one that was the Wabash River ultimately the St.

Jerome.

You will find quite a few maps where the river that we know as the Wabash was referred to as the St.

Jerome, or the Wabash and the St.

Jerome.

"St.

Jerome" lost its popularity by the end of the 1700s.

WOMAN: Terre Haute was known as "terre haute" by the French way back in the 1700s.

The French fur traders that traded with the Indians, they knew of Terre Haute, even though there was no town here whatever.

After the Revolutionary War, this area was still in contention between the French and the Spanish and the British.

The Northwest Territory was opening up and General William Henry Harrison was in Vincennes trying to claim this area.

The Native Americans that lived here wanted it to be their home as well.

WRIGHT: Chief Tecumseh was a very important person in our early history, and how he and Harrison met on several times.

And they negotiated.

They kept negotiating, "What can we work out here?"

And Harrison just wanted too much (chuckling) - wanted more than Tecumseh could give up.

HAGEN: When Fort Harrison was constructed, the pioneers that were coming out here to settle this part of the country actually built their homes around the fort for their protection.

And it turned out they needed that fort when they were attacked.

McCORMICK: Fort Harrison was built by William Henry Harrison and his army en route to what became the Tippecanoe battleground.

A whole line of forts were built from Vincennes northward -- Terre Haute, Lafayette, Fort Wayne.

And these become part of the battleground for the War of 1812.

I don't think there's any question that Harrison intended to get into a fight.

Zachary Tayler was in command in September of 1812 when the Native Americans -- British-inspired, it was believed -- attacked Fort Harrison.

Taylor did a brilliant job of putting things together.

They burned down a wall of the fort.

While they were trying to get in, he was successful in building another wall inside the wall that was destroyed, and that kept them out.

In the meantime, some friendly Indians notified the Army at Fort Knox in Vincennes about the attack, and brought about a thousand men or more up to oppose the Indians, and scared them away.

NATION: The Battle of Fort Harrison is notable and under-appreciated because it was America's first land victory of the War of 1812.

There had already been a naval victory, but there hadn't been a land victory.

There had been several land defeats.

So it was a minor skirmish in many ways, but it was important because it was the first.

[MUSIC] Well, it was strictly a real estate development.

It wasn't on freedom of religion or any of these high things.

It was strictly that Terre Haute Land Company bought this land from the government.

They laid it out and they advertised it.

They were investors.

They weren't about just to build a city.

They wanted to make money.

The city was platted.

In October 1816, they had the first sale of lots.

WRIGHT: It just offered some ideal conditions.

You had protection from the fort, and so people felt safe here.

It was good land.

There were trees.

There were forests to build their homes from, to log the good fertile ground here along the river.

Those people traveled across the Ohio River and came up the Wabash.

LEWIS: Up the river.

But it was very tedious.

Very hard going.

Slow.

WRIGHT: Some came on horseback.

At that time, there weren't any roads before the coming of the National Road.

It was just woods and hills and trees, so it was pretty desolate.

LEWIS: And there weren't bridges.

So sometimes you had to just get across the stream wherever you could find a shallow place.

Terre Haute grew along the river again, because that's where the industry was, along the river.

And it just grew.

It was a part of Sullivan County at the time, and then it became a part of Vigo.

There were some real politics involved and it became the county seat.

Fort Harrison was up there.

Eventually it was deactivated, and the post office was moved to Terre Haute.

WRIGHT: It was just decommissioned and dismantled.

People used the materials to build their barns and their homes and it just kind of disappeared.

LEWIS: Then the steamboats came.

The Florence and The Plow Boy.

And they came to Terre Haute about March, 1822.

WRIGHT: Those boats navigated the river, again, bringing people and goods here and then transporting things that we were producing here.

McCORMICK: Most all of the pre-Civil War industries were agricultural oriented.

Pork, pork was a huge operation here.

Corn was easily raised here, and a hog is a corn machine.

Pork packing was a big, big, big industry, and we had slaughterhouses all up and down the river bank.

JERSE: They say the Wabash was red with blood from pigs being butchered.

We really abused the river.

That's the way early industry did.

HAGEN: Flatboats on the river, they would load up barrels of pork that were being processed along the Wabash River banks here, and take those all the way to New Orleans.

WHO: One of the most important people to arrive in Terre Haute was Chauncey Rose.

He was a very sharp businessman, a tough S.O.B.

-- he was tough.

LEWIS: The town, when it was platted in 1816, was platted to Fifth Street, Fifth and Wabash.

It went no farther east than Fifth.

So Seventh Street, that was way out.

I mean, you were out in the prairie.

And that's why Chauncey Rose, when he built his hotel there in 1838, he called it the Prairie House.

He received a lot of ridicule about that.

People said, "What are you doing?

You're buying all this prairie land so far away from the river?"

He bought basically all the land that incorporates downtown today.

He was probably the biggest benefactor that Terre Haute ever had.

He did so much for this community.

He started Rose-Hulman -- it was Rose Polytechnic Institute -- because he saw the need for educating for skills.

Rose Dispensary, which gave free medical and dental care for years and years and years.

The Rose Orphans Home, which was supposed to be one of the best in the country.

He's one of those people who came here, as there were others later, I think, who just had a vision for what this town could become, this little town on the river.

HAGEN: George Washington was the one that first thought about doing a national road.

President Jefferson commissioned it.

It started in Cumberland, Maryland, and came all the way through Ohio and through Indiana and into Vandalia, Illinois.

That's where it ended.

That was a big thing for this country's development, and it went right through Terre Haute.

The National Road wasn't really a road.

It was just that the trees had been cleared.

There weren't any bridges and there wasn't any gravel.

In 1838, they stopped the federal money.

We had a mess here.

It was a disaster.

The road was just nothing but mud and stumps.

Nothing was done basically until 1851, when a plank road company was established.

At one time it was what we called a corduroy road.

It was just logs and mud.

It was a, I guess, pretty treacherous trip to come on the National Road, but people came.

Gateway to the West.

We were the original Gateway to the West before St.

Louis.

Many people decided to stay here and became part of the community, and others moved on west.

But we were at one time called one of the gateways to the West because of that national road.

[MUSIC] NATION: The Wabash & Erie Canal was an extension of the Erie Canal that connected the Great Lakes system.

The Wabash & Erie Canal was one of the biggest canals that was ever undertaken by the United States government.

The initial idea of the canal was only making it from Fort Wayne to Lafayette.

Then it was from Lake Erie to Lafayette.

Then it was Lake Erie to Terre Haute.

Then finally there were other canals going on elsewhere.

In our times, there has been a lot of debate about immigration issues, and some of us forget that all of us are children of immigrants.

And Terre Haute especially was a town of immigrants.

The early influx of immigrants came with the Wabash & Erie Canal, because it was Irish workers that built the canal for the most part.

It was terrible.

Pick and shovel, and dysentery and malaria and everything.

So many of them died there.

McCORMICK: The state of Indiana had gone bankrupt during this period of time, trying to get the canals done.

They cancelled all work on all canals, except for the Wabash & Erie Canal.

WRIGHT: There's sort of some romance to that whole Wabash & Erie Canal, and passage on the canal for people who were traveling.

They brought mail into Terre Haute.

They brought goods, but they also brought people.

It was just such an era of excitement when the canal boats came into town and the bells rang.

People traveled on those little canal boats.

They were horrible.

It was hot.

It was buggy.

And they operated by basically a mule or whatever, helping to guide the boat through the canal.

It was lauded this wonderful thing, and then, it just was too slow.

The canals were almost stillborn, you might say.

The canal was finished, but it had hardly been finished until the railroads were here.

Interestingly enough, it was the canal that delivered the rails (chuckling) here, so they could build the railroad that killed the canal.

[SOUND OF TRAIN RUNNING] NATION: The term "railroaded" is not necessarily a unique Terre Haute term, but some believe the definition of being stopped by a train was invented here.

McCORMICK: February 14, 1852, was the day of the first trip between Terre Haute and Indianapolis on the Terre Haute & Richmond railroad.

The railroads were so significant in terms of shipping and bringing not just goods, but people, because people came on all those different routes.

Our growth was fueled by being a transportation center in many ways.

First of all, because we were on a river.

Then because we were on the National Road east and west, as well as the Wabash & Erie canal.

And then because the railroad started growing.

McCORMICK: We got more railroads pretty much right away.

At one point in time late in the century, we had nine railroads with offices of some sort here.

WHO: Manufacturers liked Terre Haute because of its railroad location.

NATION: We had two railroad stations, one on north Seventh Street and one on north Ninth Street, that connected all major cities with dozens of round trips leaving from those stations every day.

Terre Haute took off in the late 19th century.

We had natural resources that few communities in the country had.

We were located on a navigable river, on the first national highway, on the longest man-made body of water in the western hemisphere -- in the Wabash & Erie Canal, and ultimately on one of the early midwestern railroad lines, and multiple railroad service by the time of the Civil War.

It appealed to a large number of people.

Terre Haute in the second half of the 19th century had a lot of steel and iron mills, because there was ore here, because there was coal here that could be used to fire it.

JERSE: This was a going place.

And at one time it was called the Pittsburgh of the West because it was such a going, going place.

But with that, of course, was a lot of pollution from the smokestacks, too.

Everybody's told me, in the winter the snow would just get black.

There were all kinds of industries that used the products from the farms.

And of course, distilleries used corn like crazy to make the alcohol.

We had big distilleries.

We had breweries.

The Germans came, and they of course had the advantage of coming over skilled.

They were the brewers, the farmers that knew how to do things, and all that.

They were way ahead of some of the other groups that had come just for hard labor.

WRIGHT: He was an immigrant from Germany, and he built this amazing Hulman & Company store, which eventually through all the years built into this amazing company that would employ all these people.

And developing this baking powder that would just stand the test of time.

He just was a champion for the common man and woman and child.

He was just a person with such insight and compassion for the working man, that basically, he devoted his life to the cause of labor.

We still overlook him, and the impact that he had here, far too much.

It's just that one word that gets stuck on to him that repels people, is that he was a socialist.

The kind of socialism that he was talking about is like mainstream life here now.

WRIGHT: He had to go to work at a very young age, dropped out of school, worked to support the family.

NATION: Debs learned that he was very good at communicating by way of the printed word.

He was city clerk of the city of Terre Haute for two terms.

Then he was elected for a term in the legislature as a Democrat, where he had two bills about workplace safety, because it was a dangerous time to work.

Of course, they didn't get passed.

He lost his enthusiasm for being in the legislature.

Went back into the labor movement, became a major figure through the Pullman strike of 1894.

He had a jury trial.

George Pullman, the owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company that made sleeper cars, was subpoenaed to testify.

He just didn't do it.

The judge declared a mistrial, dismissed the jury, and sentenced Debs to jail.

He wanted to end the child labor problems that we're not familiar with, but back in the early part of the 20th century, you had 10-year-olds working in factories.

That stopped, and Debs was the leader that stopped that.

He wanted to give women the right to vote well before that ever happened.

He was an advocate for social security.

That happened.

Civil rights.

And those are things that in 1910 and that era were deemed radical, and now we think of them as mainstream thought.

All of those things that we just take for granted, they had to be fought for.

BENNETT: He was a five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party.

He was a wonderful orator.

He could speak to the masses and move them.

He could write well, he could speak well, and so he represented those people well.

JERSE: He was against World War I, and at that time you could be put in prison for opposing a war.

When he got out of prison and came here, thousands welcomed him.

Because even though they would never be a socialist, they liked him as a person, because he did work for the working person.

NATION: People like Theodore Roosevelt, people like Woodrow Wilson, incorporated many of the elements that Debs stood for, and incrementally made those changes.

And the biggest changes came with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, which picked up so much of the Debs social and economic agenda.

Not a revolutionary agenda, an incremental agenda.

He just championed for the people, who were the majority of people in Terre Haute, and across America at that time, the worker.

NATION: When Debs was alive, Terre Haute was producing a number of people on the national stage.

We had a group of contemporaries in the early 20th century who proved to make a big impact on social thought in the world.

NATION: Theodore Dreiser, who was the inventor, in many ways, of the modern American novel.

BENNETT: He certainly was somebody that was a difference-maker in the literary world.

A lot of people look at him as having opened doors, and had he not done what he did to write the things that he did, a lot of the free thinking that we do today may not have been possible in the literary form.

Paul Dresser, Theodore's brother, who was in the arts and popular entertainment of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, was a major figure.

He wrote the state song of Indiana -- "On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away."

[MUSIC] BENNETT: It was well-known around the country, a million seller in sheet music back in the early part of the 20th century.

Max Ehrmann, a local poet that made an impact and still makes an impact today.

BENNETT: He wrote the poem "Desiderata," one of the most famous poems in history.

And it's a bit of a quirk because it became famous long after he died, when it became known as the "Peace Poem."

And it was on college dorm rooms all over the country.

People got connected to it, and it was popular all over the world.

And ended up being a spoken-word hit song on Top 40 Radio with a Los Angeles DJ speaking the poem over music in the background.

And it was in Top 40 rotation on radio stations in 1971 and '72.

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence."

[SOUND OF WATER RUNNING] KEARNS: Two-thirds of Indiana, two-thirds of the entire state will ultimately drain into the Wabash River.

A storm in Chicago can affect the water level here.

A storm in Shelbyville, Indiana, other side of Indianapolis, can affect the water level here.

It's interesting that the river has contributed so much to our history in many ways, and one of those ways was not such a pleasant experience for the people, because periodically it would flood.

[MUSIC] BENNETT: 1913, Easter Sunday.

It was a two or three-day event.

It started with a tornado that killed, I think, 13, 14 people here.

[MUSIC] BENNETT: It was really a horrible tornado that destroyed a lot of area.

And that storm kind of continued.

And the rain and the flooding that followed was every bit as disastrous as the tornado was, and a lot of people died in that.

And it was very chaotic, and the water was high enough to submerge houses on Maple Avenue over by Collett Park, so that's pretty deep.

The town did a lot of work to rebuild from that.

We weren't the only town in the state hit by that, but we certainly took about as hard a hit as anybody in the country.

That was a bad weekend all the way around for the Midwest, but our damage was pretty substantial.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] In the election of 1913, it was a mayoral election.

There were allegations during that election of criminal activity, bribery, that sort of thing, double voters.

Mayor Donn Roberts was elected, and he was charged with bribery, and he was found not guilty.

[MUSIC] Once that was done, Roberts thought he could get by with anything.

And he tried.

In the election of 1914, Donn Roberts was no longer a candidate.

He was already mayor.

But all the county offices were up for grabs and some city offices.

I guess he didn't think about the alternative, that there was a federal statute that law enforcement might try to use to get the venue of the trial out of Terre Haute.

At that time, Terre Haute did not have a federal district court.

It was a federal judge from Indianapolis, and the jury was made up of Indianapolis people.

Once it got out of Terre Haute, it was "Katy bar the door."

They convicted everybody, basically.

89 pled guilty without even going to trial.

So there were 20-some others that were tried.

But those included the big babies -- Mayor Roberts, circuit court judge, city judge, sheriff.

They were all found guilty.

Altogether, 116 men were found guilty.

Roberts was sentenced to six years in Leavenworth Penitentiary.

I don't know that the corruption actually impaired the operation of the city very much, except during a few years.

But it certainly implanted on the image of the town something that has been tough to erase.

[MUSIC] BENNETT: Everybody knows what a Coke bottle looks like.

In 1915, at the Root Glass Company at Third Street & Voorhees -- HAGEN: The Coca Cola Company decided that they were kind of tired of people replicating their bottles and kind of stealing their thunder a bit, so they had a contest.

BENNETT: They wanted it to be something that could be identified in the dark, that you could identify it by feel.

And even if the glass was broken on a sidewalk, you could still tell that that was a Coca Cola bottle.

They wanted to have a bottle that was so distinctive that no one else would be able to claim that they were a "Coca Cola."

BENNETT: A guy named Earl Dean, who was a bottle designer at Root Glass Company, was sent with the accountant from Root Glass Company to find an image of what they thought was the ingredients that go into Coca Cola.

And they went to the Emeline Fairbanks Library to look in encyclopedias for a cacao plant, so they could design the bottle to look like a cacao plant.

They saw a cacao pod that was shaped something like that, and that isn't even what's in Coca Cola, but the name was close, and they kind of designed it from that.

HAGEN: It was a little bit fatter in the middle when it was first designed.

Didn't go through the machinery well -- was unstable when they were trying to put the Coca Cola in it.

So they redesigned it enough to slim it down a bit.

It won the competition, regardless of its mistaken identity.

It became the most iconic beverage package, or package of almost anything, in the world.

Even the plastic versions of it now, they still retain that contour bottle look.

McCORMICK: From 1884 to 1956, Terre Haute had professional baseball.

BENNETT: The Terre Haute Tots, the Hottentots, the Terre Haute Phillies.

They had different names through the years because their affiliations with major league teams changed.

In 1901, we had a pitcher that we almost didn't sign, because he had no experience and he was already 26 years old.

In any event, he led Terre Haute to the first Three I League championship.

His name was Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown.

It was the Three I League, and Terre Haute's participation in it, that caused the construction of Memorial Stadium.

BENNETT: We had a real progressive mayor in the 1920s.

His name was Ora Davis.

He basically made it possible for Rea Park to be built, for Deming Park to be built, the Ohio Boulevard system.

They built a $425,000 stadium in 1924.

The first baseball commissioner of major league baseball came here for the opening day, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

He declared it the greatest minor league park in America.

I don't know if he was just playing to the crowd that day, but it was home for the Terre Haute minor league baseball franchises.

McCORMICK: Home plate to center field was 546 feet.

BENNETT: It was a long, long, long home run for anybody that was going to hit one.

McCORMICK: So they had to put up a temporary fence, and the temporary fence was 410 feet.

They had circuses out there, they had horse shows, the fair was held out there.

The number of major league teams that played out there?

My god, almost every year, at least one major league team was there.

BENNETT: It was converted to a football facility in the '60s, and baseball wasn't played there after that.

The arch from the original stadium is there.

The stonework on one of the walls is still there.

The concrete wall that surrounded the stadium is still there.

When they built that in 1925, it was built to last.

[MUSIC] KEARNS: In the late 1800s, we were known as the largest whiskey distiller in the world.

Not in the U.S., but in the world.

They used so many truckloads of corn every day.

The Terre Haute Brewing Company at one point was the seventh-largest brewing establishment in the United States.

It was just immense, just an immense complex.

The breweries were a good help to the economy of the city, because they bought the grain that was produced in this area to make the beer that they were producing.

BENNET: There were almost a thousand people working at the brewery downtown here, in the brewing district.

As the stories go, the local politicians made it easy for the breweries and distilleries to be here and operate here and make money here.

[MUSIC] Prohibition just killed this town because, well, you can't sell it, you can't make it.

Everything.

We had one of the largest breweries in the country, and that was out of businesses.

We had two of the largest distilleries, and they quit operating as distilleries.

Associated industries like glassmaking, packaging -- It hit the whole economy when prohibition came.

It was bad.

It was really bad for the economy.

That was the dagger for Terre Haute in terms of our vitality.

We didn't know what to do economically for years when that came about.

[MUSIC] All of that happened in the 1920s, and then the depression hit.

[MUSIC] NATION: The whole country was affected much like Terre Haute had already started to be affected.

[MUSIC] BENNETT: The lifting of that happened during the Depression, which then we're already immersed in economic collapse.

After prohibition, it came back, but you see, some of the main centers of brewing in the meantime were able to get back on their feet better.

Really, we didn't revive for a long time after that.

It happened, but it just took a long time.

The brewing and distillery industry here was such a big part of the local economy, and to have that just disappear for more than a decade, most cities our size that had a cornerstone industry go away -- those towns don't survive.

Somehow, we've cobbled together a different kind of future after that, and the economy grew into something different here.

We had a lot more manufacturing and big heavy industry here that kind of stepped into the void of what once was a different kind of town.

[MUSIC] JERSE: We had strong unions.

We're the home of Debs.

We're a mining community, a railroad community, both of which are occupations that have had strong unions, not just in Terre Haute, but everywhere in the country.

NATION: During the 1920s and 1930s, the labor movement was strong in Terre Haute.

Most companies were organized.

There was a holdout -- the Columbia Enameling Company.

They had a very strong anti-union attitude.

Efforts to organize Columbia Enameling did not go well.

There was a case that went to the Supreme Court, and actually the company lost.

They still wouldn't allow themselves to be organized.

Unions in Terre Haute all agreed that this needed to be done, so they organized a general strike to put pressure on the community to put pressure on General Housewares to allow a vote and let them be organized.

With a general strike, the newspapers didn't publish.

There were fears about things like milk being delivered.

There were fears about hospitals operating.

There were fears about streetcars running.

Nothing moved in Terre Haute that required union.

Many, many people would have been too poor in 1935 to have their own automobile, so they got around town by streetcar.

Well, the streetcars went on strike.

NATION: Strikebreakers had been brought in, and there was some violence associated with that.

My grandfather was prosecutor at the time, and he heard it was going to become pretty violent.

So he actually talked to the Governor McNutt at the time and said, "Hey, we need some help here."

NATION: Prosecutor Kearns requested the governor of Indiana send in the National Guard.

So we had martial law in Terre Haute for a time, with troops on site at Columbia Enamel.

They remained in the city, some faction of the Army Reserve, for six months after that 1935 strike.

Students of that strike will say that that was nationally driven.

It was almost concocted, in a sense, for media attention, because Terre Haute was a community back then that would receive national recognition.

NATION: We were front-page news in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and around the country.

So that left a mark on Terre Haute which was hard to live down for many years.

Today, people don't know about it.

Believe me, no company has made a choice not to locate in Terre Haute because of a general strike 80 years ago.

That's just not the case.

But it was part of our reputation for probably a good 25, 30, 40 years afterwards.

WRIGHT: One of the things that sometimes a community will experience is that "rose colored glasses."

You're comfortable and you're in your own little world and nothing's affecting you.

And well, maybe that's going on, but that doesn't involve me.

[MUSIC] WRIGHT: There's just this turning a blind eye to it.

Or if you're a citizen living in my little comfortable suburban neighborhood, or the country club, or whatever, that doesn't affect you.

You don't see it.

Sometimes then what happens as a result, is that builds and then it becomes a bigger problem.

JERSE: In 1961, the "Saturday Evening Post" featured an article about we just didn't care here.

All the gambling, the prostitution and all that.

It was a nasty, nasty article.

WRIGHT: Terre Haute has a history of gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, political corruption.

That sort of free-wheeling society seems odd in a small town in Indiana, but that was the circumstance here back in the early part of the 20th century.

NATION: The red-light district was an element of this community from the late 19th century until almost the mid-20th century.

Terre Haute was a river town, a coal mining town, a mercantile town, and a traveling salesman town, and a railroad center, a travel center.

That helped the sin industry in Terre Haute, Indiana.

We had a lot of gambling, and I think some of it was at the clubs behind scenes, upstairs on Wabash Avenue.

NATION: In 1957, FBI agents raided with the largest bookie operation in the United States in downtown Terre Haute.

There was a months-long federal trial in Indianapolis, with people from all over the country who had been arrested, including Harpo Marx and some other people who were known at the time of being customers of this bookie operation.

So that got us pages of coverage in "Life Magazine" in the late 1950s.

And then that helped land in the "Saturday Evening Post."

I don't think we were that unusual, except for the publicity, I guess.

Between "Saturday Evening Post" and the Indianapolis paper.

It did exist.

We were, actually, I think no better nor no worse than a lot of the cities throughout the country.

It was everywhere, but we kind of got the tag.

I'm from the Chicago area.

You know, sin is everywhere.

That kind of reputation, because it was so prevalent here, and almost winked at, in a way, by the politicians and people from around the state, too, that it stuck with the town for a long time, even after all those things went away.

It takes a long time to build up a reputation.

It doesn't take long to tear it down.

In the same way, a bad reputation sticks for a long time.

HAGEN: Transportation has played a real part in the building of this community and its history.

BENNETT: It actually was at one point the crossing point of the two major national roads from east to west and north to south.

That's at Seventh Street and Wabash Avenue.

JERSE: It brought a lot of business to Terre Haute.

A lot of tourists would stop here.

Businessmen would stop here.

People did travel that, one way or another.

NATION: When President Eisenhower was in office from '52 to '60, one of his major goals was the interstate system.

One of the principal reasons for it was as a national defense system, in order that military vehicles and troops in time of war could move easily.

The building of the Holiday Inn before the roads even existed down there, before the interstate existed, based on it was coming, started signaling -- showing the change was going to come.

BENNETT: I-70 opened in 1967, the stretch of it that went from here to Indianapolis.

At the actual moment that the interstate opened, the traffic downtown going through Wabash Avenue was immediately reduced in large numbers.

It was clear to people who had wondered what would happen when it did, and all they had to do was step out of their shoe shop or their restaurant or their tavern and look out on Wabash Avenue, and see so few cars out there.

I mean, it was immediate.

They just couldn't believe it.

One day all these trucks were going through Terre Haute, and the day that opened, it stopped.

NATION: The effects of I-70 on downtown were catastrophic in the sense of downtown's survival as a retail marketplace.

BENNETT: Very quickly things started migrating toward the U.S.

41 and I-70 intersection.

NATION: What's happened here has happened all over the country.

We're not unique in that.

There are very few downtowns that survived the interstate system.

It instantly changed the sensical pattern of building an economy around a high traffic area.

JERSE: Indiana is a basketball state, let's face it.

All the jokes are about Hoosiers going around the cornfields, dribbling a basketball.

Larry Bird was wonderful for this town.

He put Terre Haute on the map.

You meet somebody on an airplane, you say Terre Haute, the first thing I always hear is, "That's where Larry Bird played."

Always.

That's the first thing people connect with here.

And that's not a bad thing, that's a great thing.

That era when the Sycamores were at the top of the heap in the United States was just incredible.

NATION: Larry was a blue-collar, working-class guy who worked hard.

He had those basketball fundamentals.

And Larry Bird fit the image of what most people around here thought should be a basketball player -- that work ethic, the practice, the never giving up.

WRIGHT: The city was here and very well-established before ISU was here.

You can't help but view it as a college town because, my goodness, there's Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, there's Rose-Hulman, there's ISU, there's Ivy Tech.

I don't think you can not describe it as a college town.

But it certainly isn't a college town like Bloomington.

Because Bloomington is IU.

Bloomington grew because of IU.

And I don't think that's how you would describe Terre Haute.

NATION: Higher education is so much more important now than it was 50, 75, 100 years ago.

We had the same institutions at that point, but they were relatively small institutions.

We have five higher education institutions, and we are all symbolically different.

We all serve a different pipeline of students, very specific arenas in which we do that.

There's just so many resources to share, and so much knowledge to share.

And I think that's what's important when a town and a university exist together geographically.

I think you have to learn from each other.

[MUSIC] I think there's always just been that, "ISU's over there and we're here, and they keep infringing on us."

But I think that is changed.

I think it's changed because the town has changed and started to say, "Hey, we need to embrace those college students.

They're important to us.

They bring excitement.

They bring energy."

And then ISU has said, "We need to engage in this community."

And I think that's been a real significant change is that the university has said, "We need to become a part of this community.

We've got to give our students experiences in the real world."

And Terre Haute is a real city, and there are real things going on here.

And there's a lot going on here.

I think they've really ventured outside of the university community.

The colleges and the university are our largest generators of jobs and income and of brainpower.

Our challenge is how to both make Terre Haute the kind of place that younger people want to live in, want to stay here, that has the amenities that one would expect.

But also then finding a way to generate jobs.

It's one thing to want to stay here.

It's another thing to find a job that can allow you to stay here.

We've got to connect the dots.

I don't think that everything is missing.

I think we do a poor job of connecting the dots.

So I think that's our job.

We have to figure out as citizens how important is it that we're a college town, and do we want to figure out how to do that?

LORICK: Terre Haute has been good to me.

It's been good for me, but I don't know that it's been good for everybody.

It's where you sit or where you stand.

There are certain pockets in this community, that where they sit, it doesn't look so great.

And then for some folk, from where they stand and the vantage point that they get to view the Wabash Valley, it's pretty good.

And so I think the assessment of that would be different for different folk.

It depends on where you sit and where you stand.

NATION: From an income standpoint, Vigo County is among the poorer counties in the state.

LESLIE: The infrastructure that we have in place makes it hard for some people to be successful.

I don't even mean from an economics perspective -- I mean from a "big idea" perspective.

Culture, the world is changing, and Terre Haute is behind.

There are things that we need to be doing here that we're not doing.

But yet at the same time, you have those people who understand what needs to be done, and they're seeing success.

LORICK: I see it as a city with a heart.

Sometimes I'd like to see that heart have a little more focus on it, though.

A lot of our non-profit agencies receive a lot of benefit from folks who give support to agencies who do good work.

JERSE: Terre Haute has every kind of agency or organization or church that helps people.

It is absolutely fabulous.

All the way from the shoe bus to Catholic Charities, everything in between.

REYNOLDS: The cost of living is low.

So if people are having some kind of problems, economic problems, they know they can get some kind of job here and they don't have high expenses.

So they know they can live here.

This is a place you can live with a little amount of income.

It's small, where people feel like they're being embraced.

Whereas big cities, nobody knows you.

But here they do, because you've gone to school with them, or you recognize them, they recognize you.

NASSER: Back in 2008, our state legislature implemented the property tax caps, and that probably affected us worse than anybody.

Because our city, like all cities, most of their revenue comes from property taxes.

JERSE: Terre Haute, for a city its size, has the oldest housing inventory in the state.

NASSER: Our housing stock here, 70 percent of it was built before 1950.

And of that, half of it was built before 1900.

Fifty percent of our residents own homes, 48 percent rent homes.

So until we have people that want to take values into their property, want to stay here, nestle here, and until we fix that, then we're going to continue to struggle.

We need to work on improving our assessed values of our homes.

That way we can start working on our infrastructure, working more on improving our roads, more on improving our sidewalks, attracting businesses to come here.

NASSER: As a community, we reminisce a little bit too much.

We think of how it used to be, and that's how it should always be, instead of taking a risk, taking a chance, looking at the glass half full, not half empty.

Every community can say, "Hey, we used to this.

We used to do that."

So to me, history is exciting.

I talk about it a lot.

We learn from it.

But wouldn't it be great to create our own history now?

[MUSIC] LESLIE: The people, I think, that have come before us in our community have done really great things.

I think our history is a solid one.

I mean, we have kind of a fun, racy history too.

But historically, people before me and my generation figured out things that needed to happen, and have really set us up for some really great successes.

I think it's an effort.

You have to make the effort.

It's like anything in life.

And I think that's what makes or breaks a community is who's willing to make the effort?

Who's willing to step forward and say, "Here's what we can do to make it a better place to live."

The biggest challenge that we face is apprehension and timidity.

If we don't pursue some of the things that are on the table for us, that could happen, that the plans are all laid out.

If those get stalled or left behind because they're too expensive or too time-consuming, or, "We can't do that here" kind of thing, then we lose.

[MUSIC] I feel like we're reaching a critical mass.

We're reaching a time or a point where enough people are involved, enough organizations are wanting to do something, that we're going to hit this tipping point where all of a sudden, people go, "Ooh, that's the place I want to go live."

And I think that's what it's going to take to actually make Terre Haute what it could be.

It's a good place to raise your family, and the infrastructure is starting to turn the corner.

There are some challenges that concern us as young professionals, but it's still a really good place to raise your family.

I look at it this way.

Four-year-old daughter.

She'll be 18 before I know it.

In 14 years, we have to do something so that she can say, "Daddy, I love you.

I want a place to settle, to stay."

And hopefully, we can get to that point.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC] PostCAP LLC postcapllc.com 844-335-0911