Book Review

Crawfordsville, Athens of Indiana

Montgomery County, Indiana

Karen Zach, Montgomery County Indiana Historian has put together a worthy book for her first foray into "real" publication. Karen is not new to the people who research history in Montgomery County.

Karen, who is a teacher, and an enormous asset to the Community, is well known among Historians, and Genealogists. Karen has been coordinating the USGenWeb Project web page for the County for some time, she is also a past President of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Dorothy Q Chapter, and maintains that website as well. Karen is Ambassador of much of the history and genealogy in the County, and her close support of Crawfordsville's District Library, and its extensive resources, is highly commendable.

Karen is to be commended for her efforts to get copious amounts of data out to the public. In that spirit she took on the project of composing a Crawfordsville history for the "Making of America" series.

The Making of America series is a nationwide project of local histories, and using vintage photos, and excerpts from many local sources, Karen has done an excellent job for the community of Crawfordsville.

For more than 150 years Crawfordsville has been a central place for the cutting edge of culture in western Indiana.
From being the place where many generals of the Civil War began the recruiting for that conflict, and the literary endeavors of General Lew Wallace and others, to the influence and confluence of the railroads and the General Land Office on the people of the entire region, she touches all of these. The developments of Basketball as a sport, and the archetectural impact of Crawfordsville, are also key points.

Karen leads us from the earliest days of the County, to the modern-post September 11, 2001- era.
One part of the history leads us right into the next in a continuous tapestry of what makes this City uniquely Hoosier. Wabash College, an early institute of higher education, was a drawing point for the great minds, and the environment of Crawfordsville must have been ripe, rich, and sweet, because many inventions sprang from it, great works of literature and art abound, and it seems that everyone has something to add to the general progress of the region and especially Montgomery County.

Taken as a place of history, and as an undeniable place IN history, Crawfordsville is and was the "Athens of Indiana". Perhaps it is the Athens of the whole USA.

Crawfordsville, Athens of Indiana,
Copyright © 2003, Karen Bazzani Zach
Arcadia Publishing,
Tempus Publishing, 2 Cumberland Street, Charleston, South Carolina, USA. 29401

Library of Congress Catalog Card #2002116806

ISBN: 0738524174