gas brought Muncie its most successful industrial concern. Two brothers, Frank and Edmund Ball, had founded Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company in Buffalo, New York. They made glass jars that rural and small-town families used to preserve fruits and vegetables throughout the winter. When their Buffalo factory burned down in 1886, the brothers searched for a new location where the business would be less costly to run. Indiana presented such an opportunity. Gas for their glassblowing furnaces was plentiful and cheap. Muncie’s business leaders offered the Ball Company free gas for five years and free land if the brothers moved their business west. The company, now under the management of all five brothers, struck a deal and set out for Indiana.8
The Balls manufactured lids and seals along with their jars. The matching components were more reliable than nearly any other product on the market. By the turn of the century, the company was part of a growing move in Muncie toward heavy industry and larger firms serving larger markets. Ball Brothers produced more than a third of the nation’s canning jars, and the brothers were among the richest men in the state.9 The brothers were renowned in the company’s early years for peeling down to shirtsleeves, especially Frank Ball, and taking their turns at machines on the shop floor. Their unassuming manner won them admiration among workers, and the company came to be identified with the city as both grew in tandem. The Ball factories dominated Muncie’s south side and poured smoke into the sky from the corner of 9th and Macedonia Streets (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Ball Brothers factory. By the beginning 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
