Vigo County is a county on the western border of the U.S. state of Indiana. According to the 2020 United States Census, it had a population of 106,153. Its county seat is Terre Haute.
Sullivan County is a county in the U.S. state of Indiana, and determined by the US Census Bureau to include the mean center of U.S. population in 1940. As of 2023, the population was estimated at 20,757. The county seat is Sullivan. Sullivan County is included in the Terre Haute, Indiana, metropolitan statistical area.
James Whitcomb was a United States senator and the eighth governor of Indiana. As governor during the Mexican–American War, he oversaw the formation and deployment of the state's levies. He led the movement to replace the state constitution and played an important role at the convention to institute a law that prevented the government from taking loans in response the current fiscal crisis in Indiana. By skillfully guiding the state through its bankruptcy, Whitcomb is usually credited as being one of the most successful of Indiana's governors. He was elected to the United States Senate after his term as governor but died of kidney disease only three years later.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana is a federal district court in Indiana. It was created in 1928 by an act of Congress that split Indiana into two separate districts, northern and southern. The Southern District is divided into four divisions, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Evansville, and New Albany. Appeals from the Southern District of Indiana are taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The court has five judges, four full-time United States magistrate judges and two part-time magistrate judges.
Winfield Taylor Durbin was an American politician serving as the 25th governor of the U.S. state of Indiana from 1901 to 1905. His term focused on progressive legislation and suppression of white cap vigilante organizations operating in the southern part of the state. He was the seventh and last veteran of the American Civil War to serve as governor.
For John Waterman of Rhode Island see John R. Waterman House
White caps were groups involved in the whitecapping movement who were operating in southern Indiana in the late 19th century. They engaged in vigilante justice and lynchings, with modern viewpoints describing their actions as domestic terrorism. They became common in the state following the American Civil War and lasted until the turn of the 20th century. White caps were especially active in Crawford and neighboring counties in the late 1880s. Several members of the Reno Gang were lynched in 1868, causing an international incident. Some of the members had been extradited to the United States from Canada and were supposed to be under federal protection. Lynchings continued against other criminals, but when two possibly innocent men were killed in Corydon in 1889, Indiana responded by cracking down on the white cap vigilante groups, beginning in the administration of Isaac P. Gray.
Ida Husted Harper was an American author, journalist, columnist, and suffragist, as well as the author of a three-volume biography of suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony at Anthony's request. Harper also co-edited and collaborated with Anthony on volume four (1902) of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage and completed the project by solo writing volumes five and six (1922) after Anthony's death. In addition, Harper served as secretary of the Indiana chapter of the National Woman Suffrage Association, became a prominent figure in the women's suffrage movement in the U.S., and wrote columns on women's issues for numerous newspapers across the United States. Harper traveled extensively, delivered lectures in support of women's rights, handled press relations for a women's suffrage amendment in California, headed the National American Woman Suffrage Association's national press bureau in New York City and the editorial correspondence department of the Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education in Washington, D.C., and chaired the press committee of the International Council of Women.
In Forsyth County, Georgia, in September 1912, two separate alleged attacks on white women in the Cumming area resulted in black men being accused as suspects. First, a white woman reportedly awoke to find a black man in her bedroom; then days later, a white teenage girl was beaten and raped, later dying of her injuries.
Terre Haute Lodge No. 19, F&AM is a lodge of Freemasons in Terre Haute, Indiana. It is the oldest existing organization in the city and in Vigo County, with the exception of Vigo County Government.
Katherine "Flossie" Bailey was a civil rights and anti-lynching activist from Indiana. She established a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Marion, Indiana, in 1918 and became especially active fighting for justice and equality following the double lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in 1930. As president of the Indiana NAACP, Bailey was pivotal in lobbying for passage of a statewide anti-lynching law in Indiana in 1931 and advocated for a similar bill at the national level. She was also a recipient of the national NAACP's Madam C. J. Walker Medal.
John Small was an American gunsmith, frontiersman, soldier, and public official. An Irish immigrant to Pennsylvania, he served in the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he served as sheriff of Knox County, Indiana, as a territorial legislator, and as Indiana Territory's first Adjutant General.
Peter Buell Allen was a politician and military commander in New York State in the early 1800s and a pioneer of Vigo County and Terre Haute, Indiana.
William "Froggie" James, an African-American man, was lynched and his dead body mutilated on November 11, 1909 by a mob in Cairo, Illinois, after he was charged with the rape and murder of 23-year-old shop clerk Anna Pelley.
In the early hours of December 12, 1880, a white mob in Clay County, Indiana lynched George Scott, an African American man. Scott had fled after being accused of a crime in nearby Eaglesfield, Indiana, and was captured near Indianapolis and brought to the Clay County jail in Brazil, Indiana. Rumors swirled that a mob might form, but the local Sheriff, James Lankford, paid them no heed. However, the man left in charge of the jail, ex-Sheriff Jacob Baumunk, took the precaution of giving the keys to Sheriff Lankford, who would not be on-site at the jail, after locking up. Sometime between one and three in the morning on Sunday, December 12, a mob of over 100 men, masked, descended on the jail and demanded that Baumunk give them the keys. After informing the mob that he did not have the keys, he was told to “retire to his room.”
A mob of white Vigo County, Indiana, residents lynched George Ward, a black man, on February 26, 1901 in Terre Haute, Indiana, for the suspected murder of a white woman. An example of a spectacle lynching, the event was public in nature and drew a crowd of over 1,000 white participants. Ward was dragged from a jail cell in broad daylight, struck in the back of the head with a sledgehammer, hanged from a bridge, and burned. His toes and the hobnails from his boots were collected as souvenirs. A grand jury was convened but no one was ever charged with the murder of Ward. It is the only known lynching in Vigo County. The lynching was memorialized 120 years later with a historical marker and ceremony.
James McLean Hanna was an American politician, lawyer, and judge from the state of Indiana who served in the Indiana State Senate and as a Justice on the Indiana Supreme Court.
On October 11, 1878, Jim Good, Jeff Hopkins, Ed Warner, William Chambers, and Dan Harris, Sr. were lynched in Posey County, Indiana, near the town of Mount Vernon. These men, who were allegedly connected to the robbery of a brothel, were killed by a white mob who broke into the jail where they were being held. Two other men, Dan Harris, Jr. and John Harris, were also lynched in the days leading up to October 11, in connection with the same alleged offense. This racial terror lynching is the largest reported lynching in Indiana's history.
James Matlock Ogden was an American lawyer and Republican politician who served as the twenty-sixth Indiana Attorney General from January 1, 1929 to January 1, 1933.
