INIndiana Fun Facts

Indiana was the country's time zone problem for half a century. Counties picked their own clocks, most of the state refused daylight saving, and figuring out what time it was in Indianapolis in July required a chart. The legislature finally imposed statewide daylight saving in 2006, and twelve counties still run on Central time while the rest run Eastern.

Facts most people get wrong

• Nobody knows what Hoosier means. Etymologists have floated a dozen origins, from a contractor named Hoosier to a frontier greeting, and none has been proven. The state uses the word anyway, on everything.
• The Indianapolis 500 is not 500 laps. It is 200 laps of a two and a half mile oval, which adds up to 500 miles.
• The Brickyard nickname is not decoration. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was paved with 3.2 million bricks in 1909, and a three foot strip of the original surface still sits at the start and finish line, which winners kneel down and kiss.
• Indiana is not uniformly flat. Glaciers never reached the southern third of the state, so the hills, ravines and Ohio River bluffs down there are steep enough to make road builders work for it.
• The Jackson 5 were not a Detroit group by origin. The brothers grew up in Gary and had been performing around the Midwest before Motown signed them.
• Indianapolis was not built on a navigable river. The site was chosen in 1821 on the assumption that steamboats could reach it up the White River. One tried in 1831, made it to town, and ran aground heading back out.

Records and firsts

• Wabash became the first city in the world lit by electric street lighting on March 31, 1880, when four arc lamps were switched on above the courthouse.
• The first Indianapolis 500 ran on May 30, 1911, won by Ray Harroun. It remains the largest single day spectator sporting event in the world.
• New Castle Fieldhouse seats 8,224 people, the largest high school gymnasium anywhere, and it is not the only Indiana high school gym that outdraws small colleges.
• Indiana produces more steel than any other state, most of it from the Calumet region mills around Gary.
• Indiana limestone quarried near Bedford faces the Empire State Building and the Pentagon, along with a long list of state capitols and cathedrals.
• Indiana became the 19th state on December 11, 1816.

Geography that surprises

• Twelve counties run on Central time, six of them near Chicago in the northwest and six near Evansville in the southwest. The other 80 counties are Eastern.
• The Ohio River forms the entire southern border, but the state line sits at the river's 1792 low water mark on the Indiana side, which means the water itself belongs to Kentucky.
• Indiana holds about 45 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, and the dunes there became Indiana Dunes National Park in 2019.
• Hoosier Hill, the highest point in the state at 1,257 feet, sits in a farm woodlot in Wayne County at the end of a gravel road, with a bench and a mailbox for visitors.
• At 38th in area, Indiana is the smallest state in the continental US west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Where the name comes from

Indiana means land of the Indians, but the name did not start in Indiana. A Philadelphia land company took the name for a tract along the Ohio River in what is now West Virginia, granted to it by the Iroquois in 1768 as compensation for traders' losses.

When Congress split the Northwest Territory in 1800 it reused the name for the new western half, and statehood in 1816 made it permanent. The people the name honors were pushed out within a generation, the largest forced removal being the Potawatomi march out of northern Indiana in 1838.

Quick stats

• Population: 5 to 10 million
• Area rank: #38 of 50
• Admitted: 1816
• Capital: Indianapolis
• Largest city: Indianapolis
• Time zones: Eastern and Central
• Nickname: Hoosier State
• Motto: Crossroads of America

Bordering states

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