There Is More To Know

Why It Started and Where It Is

Madison County occupies a stretch of central Indiana in the White River valley, about forty miles northeast of Indianapolis, in the flat, fertile farmland that makes up much of the state's interior. The county seat is Anderson, a city whose name preserves the memory of the Delaware (Lenape) people who lived here before American settlement: the town was founded in 1823 at the site of a Delaware Indian village, and its name honors William Anderson — Kikthawenund — a Delaware sub-chief whose village, called Wapiminskink ("chestnut tree place"), stood near the same ground.

The county was organized in 1823 and named after President James Madison. The Berry family, among the early settlers, donated thirty-two acres for the county seat on the condition that Anderson become the county seat — which it did, the county's administrative gravity moving from Pendleton to Anderson between 1828 and 1836. The White River, which runs through the county, provided the early settlement with water power and a transportation corridor. The farmland of the surrounding county, with the deep glacial soils that Indiana's Corn Belt depends on, was the economic foundation: corn and hogs and wheat, the agricultural trinity of the middle-nineteenth-century Midwest.