EINU began to offer classes in 1899 in an impressive neoclassical building (Figure 3). The handsome brick structure could not guarantee its success, however. The school paired suburban development with educational growth, but the institution foundered, lacking students and prestige. The institution failed and was resurrected three times in the next eighteen years. In one unsuccessful scheme to reorganize the institution, representatives of the EINUA tried to convince leaders of nearby Taylor University to relocate to Muncie.20 Taylor administrators demurred, and after its third bankruptcy, the Muncie school could find no new backers.21
Figure 3. Eastern Indiana Normal University Administration Building. A real-estate scheme financed the founding of Eastern Indiana Normal University, including construction of its administration building. The building still serves as the administration headquarters for Ball State University. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
After the institution failed for the last time in 1917, an Indiana court ordered liquidation to repay the school’s creditors. The assets were worth more than $400,000 and included the administration building, a wood-frame dormitory for women, and about seventy acres of land. The creditors sought to recoup their investment with a plan to break up the properties and sell the land as individual parcels to the highest bidders.22
By that point, hundreds of residents lived in the suburban settlements of Normal City and Riverside. Alva Kitselman, the city’s second leading industrialist, was the most prominent resident of the area. He moved from a house near downtown and built a twenty-six-acre estate the size of a city block in 1915, just three blocks from the east edge of the campus. Around his estate, an array of industrial and white-collar workers, from foremen to physicians to carpenters to salesmen, lived scattered throughout Normal City, but there was plenty of room for additional growth.23
The Ball Family Takes Over
The Ball brothers had created a neighborhood of architect-designed homes on the White River less than a mile east of the college, starting in the 1890s.24 Years before, Lucina, one of two sisters to the five Ball brothers, had written them extensive advice about building homes. “It is risky building a good house in any place that may be made undesirable by some one putting up a poor class of buildings,” she wrote. “Can’t you get up a ‘syndicate’ to buy a whole square and build it all equally good, and so make your own surroundings. Houses moderately expensive, with neighborhoods fine and insured, would be a good thing.”25 Her counsel drew on models of classic suburban development schemes across the country and in Europe.26
The Balls faced the prospect of a Wild West of boom and bust and scattershot building in their neighborhood. Lucina’s worry about a “poor class of buildings” nearby was an increasing possibility. The auction would open the normal school’s land to individual development, lot by lot, if the creditors won and sold the land to clear their debts. Further, the municipality and plan commission would not be able to restrain new development because the area was unincorporated and lay outside the boundaries of the city of Muncie. Frank Ball set his lawyer, Carl Robe White, to acquiring the land, and on the day of the auction, George Ball took the phone call closing the deal.27 However, the slighted creditors sued the Balls to recoup their investments and promised to hold up any development plans for years through lengthy litigation.28
Charles McGonagle saw a way out of the mess. McGonagle was a longtime Muncie politician and chair of the state’s Ways and Means Committee, powerful enough to move policy through the legislature and enough of a Muncie booster to promote the city as an arm of government. In 1917 he led passage of a law empowering the state to accept land donations on behalf of colleges and universities.29 McGonagle broached the subject to George Ball at a Muncie Rotary meeting in early 1918. The Muncie Rotary Club comprised the civic and business leadership of the community. George and Frank C. Ball were members and Frank’s sons, Edmund A. and Frank E. Ball, would later become members.30 McGonagle suggested that the governor and state legislature would be willing to accept a donation of the campus property and operate a branch campus of the Indiana State Normal School (ISNS, now Indiana State University) based in Terre Haute. The representative contacted Governor James Goodrich and found him receptive to the idea of state-sponsored higher education in east central Indiana.31 Goodrich and George Ball were both rising figures in the Republican Party; Ball would become a member of the Republican National Committee, while Goodrich would serve in the administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.32 Establishment of a new public institution would serve the area’s business and political interests, while strengthening the politicians’ individual influence in their home region and their broader goal of collaboration between private enterprise and the state. Indeed, when state education administrators arrived in Muncie to inspect the property, the Muncie Commercial Club led a crowd of two hundred strong to celebrate the state officials.33
The Ball donation to the state was especially important to the family’s interests because state ownership relieved the family of liabilities that came along with the school. Several creditors were irate about debts redeemed at less than ten cents on the dollar. They brought lawsuits to mitigate their losses, but under the agreement with the state, any lawsuits would have to be directed at, and defended by, the state of Indiana.34 The ISNS board of trustees ratified the governor’s bargain on the condition that Frank Ball serve as a trustee for the school. Ball agreed and sealed the political deal.
Muncie Politics
Rollin “Doc” Bunch, Muncie’s mayor, was no fool. The leader of the city’s Democratic machine realized he had to act when the development of desirable northwestern Muncie became an issue in his 1917 campaign for reelection. Normal City and Riverside were next to the Normal School, just outside the urban boundaries of Muncie. These neighborhoods escaped municipal taxation but contracted with the city for services such as water and sewer. In 1909 Muncie had annexed much of the industrial south side into the city. Thus, working-class homeowners in Industry paid more in property taxes than residents in the more expensive subdivision of Normal City.35 Bunch benefited electorally from the annexation of Democratic south-side industrial workers. By keeping the Republican-voting, professional-class suburbanites out of the city’s electorate, the mayor had consolidated political power in the midst of metropolitan growth.
The 1917 mayoral campaign was a classic contest pitting a progressive Republican challenger against a Democratic machine politician. Charles Grafton, the Republican, made taxation and metropolitan equity one of the centerpieces of his run. Bunch drew support from the northeastern and southeastern areas of the city populated by working-class residents, both black and white. He also presided over a city payroll tens of thousands of dollars larger than any of his predecessors.36 Grafton was an officer of a clay-pot manufacturer and lived in the city’s East End. He attacked Bunch from different directions. He ran on a populist line in order to drive a wedge between the machine mayor and his working-class constituents. Grafton pledged that he would not allow the new educated and professional class of the northwestern suburbs to enjoy Muncie’s urban amenities without contributing their fair share of taxes.37 Then his campaign invoked the classic Progressive Era bogeyman of a saloonkeeper politician. Billy Finan was an Irish barkeeper who loomed large in the mind of Muncie Republicans. The longtime politician was a cog in the Indiana Democratic machine who had worked his way up to serving as a state nominating delegate, a position he held for several decades in the first half of the century.38 A full-page newspaper advertisement in the city’s Republican-leaning Star asked about annexation: “Why didn’t Dr. Bunch and his council use this power? Because the residents of these suburbs were overwhelmingly ‘dry’ and Billy Finan and the crowd back of Dr. Bunch would sooner cut off their right hands than
