Invisible Landscapes

The various groups of Indiana pioneers and their ways never did have an exclusive habitat in the state; there was a measure of contact and blending among the groups from the outset. Even when Indiana was a young state, settled most heavily in the southern third of its territory and largely by Southerners, the people themselves and onlookers alike recognized that there were differences in words and ways from place to place. In the southeast corner, which drew settlers from everywhere in the settled part of the country, what seemed like a great many Yankees came to live, giving some of the counties there enough of a Yankee shading of speech and manners that there was worry among the Southerners that Indiana would become a Yankee state like Ohio. This was not what the Southerners wanted to happen, for they were not drawn to Yankee ways, nor did the Yankees find Southern culture much to their liking. On the other hand, parts of the downriver southwest were comfortably Southern; and Edward Eggleston picked the speech of Posey County in the very pocket of the state as an example of "extreme Hoosier," as he called it. Indiana did turn out to be a Yankee state, though the least Yankee of the states of the Old Northwest. And the Yankee influence that Timothy Flint reported in 1828 may have survived to this day. For example, in the Switzerland County town of Vevay, some of the life-long citizens sound distinctly like Northerners.1