George Cottman: Indiana Historian

In the spring of 1905 in his Irvington, Indiana, home, a small-time printer and writer of numerous articles on Hoosier history for area newspapers set type for a new publication. This job was different from tasks the printer had performed in the past for paying customers because the periodical he printed on a Gordon press featured his name on the masthead as editor.

Although he later told an Indianapolis Star reporter that it had been “folly to undertake such a thing,” as he had insufficient funds to embark on such a financially risky venture, the periodical George S. Cottman started more than a hundred years ago—the Indiana Magazine of History—survives today as a quarterly magazine devoted to informing and instructing those interested in the nineteenth state’s past.

Cottman was born in Indianapolis on May 10, 1857, in a house at Market and Mississippi Streets, just a short distance from the Indiana Statehouse. His father, John, was a tailor by trade. In 1859, suffering an attack of gold fever, John traveled west by ox train to Colorado accompanied by some Indianapolis friends. John returned to Indianapolis a short time later with only enough gold to make three rings, one of which his son, George, had in his possession when he died. Shortly after returning from service as a quartermaster with the Nineteenth Regiment of Indiana Volunteers during the Civil War, John moved his family, including ten-year-old George, to a farm near present-day Beech Grove.

From 1873 until the early part of 1877, George learned the printing trade as an apprentice with the Indianapolis Sentinel. “I found,” he said of those days, “that a post-graduate course in a printing office, especially when supplemented by a good free public library, played no small part in widening my mental horizon.” Instead of a particular college or university, Cottman considered himself an alumnus of the Sentinel, the Indianapolis Public Library, and the Indiana State Library.

Forced to return to the family farm in Beech Grove because of his poor health, Cottman turned to a trade he found more conducive to his self-described “inborn wanderlust”—writing. At an early age he discovered that he possessed a knack for creating engaging compositions. Becoming a writer, he joked, offered to him “a pleasant substitute for work.”

Unfortunately, Cottman experienced difficulty in finding anyone willing to publish his early manuscripts. One of his souvenirs from his time as a struggling writer consisted of a scrapbook he kept filled with rejection slips reflecting editors’ various styles. Cottman even went so far as to journey to New York City, reasoning that the direct application of his self-described “magnetic personality” would thaw the hearts of cold-hearted editors. The attempt failed; the would-be writer had to find employment in a small print shop in order to earn enough money his return to Indiana.  

Fortunately for Cottman, it was also during this time that he began to have better luck with Indianapolis editors than he had ever had with what he called the “haughty publishers of the effete East.” As a freelance writer, he contributed articles to the Indiana Farmer, the Indianapolis Journal, the Indianapolis News, and the Indianapolis Press. In writing for local newspapers, he found that there was always a ready market for historical articles. “As a newspaper space filler ever in search of good copy,” he said, “I found that few special topics offered a richer mine than does history with its veins of romance, adventure, human interest stories, or what you will.”

Cottman was determined to publish his own history magazine. He trimmed expenses eliminated these expenses by writing most of the material that appeared in the magazine and printing it himself. Each potential subscriber received a “Prospectus” that had been prepared by Cottman and which included the editor’s code for his new venture: “The publication will be strictly what it purports to be at the start—a  magazine devoted to the preservation and collating of matter that is of real value to the historical student. There will be no space given to advertising ‘write-ups,’ and no cheap padding. Of matter within its legitimate field there is an abundance, and outside of this field it will make no bid for popular favor.”

Encouraged by the response to his Prospectus, Cottman launched his creation in the spring of 1905 as The Indiana Quarterly Magazine of History. He printed a thousand copies of this first number and charged one dollar a year for a subscription or thirty cents for a single copy. The first issue featured articles, most written by Cottman, on the “Father of Indiana History,” John Brown Dillon; the teaching of history in Hoosier elementary schools; and Indian towns in Marion County. Included also were a list of Indiana newspapers that were located in the state library and the journal, presumably edited by Cottman, of John Tipton, one of the commissioners appointed to select the site of the state capital.

At the end of the first year, the subscriber list for the IMH stood at approximately three hundred. The small circulation “barely paid expenses,” said Cottman. The editor noted that the magazine would have ceased publication if not for “the friendly aid of several wellwishers who added to their personal subscriptions a number of extra ones.” The hard work involved in managing the magazine, however, took its toll on Cottman’s health. It may have even contributed to his decision at the end of 1907 to move his family from Indiana to the Pacific Northwest. Cottman settled in the small town of Vaughn, Washington, in search, he said, of a “more congenial climate.”

During the two years that Cottman was in Washington, Christopher B. Coleman, then a member of the history department at Butler University and later director of the Indiana Historical Bureau and secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, took over as IMH editor. Before Cottman left, the magazine had received a shot in the arm from the Society, which had pledged an amount not to exceed $150 to ensure the publication’s continued existence.

By the summer of 1910 Cottman had returned to Indiana. When Coleman left the statein 1911 to pursue graduate work at Columbia University, Cottman once again took over as IMH editor. He continued in that post until 1913, when the responsibility for publishing the magazine was turned over to Indiana University’s history department. It was an amicable change. Cottman admitted to James A. Woodburn, chairman of the department, that he could not keep up with the rigors of publishing the magazine. The March 1913 IMH was the last issue under Cottman’s guiding hand.

Although Cottman had given up his editorship of the IMH, he did not give up his interest in the Hoosier state’s past. He wrote historical pageants for the 1916 Indiana centennial celebration and produced a history of the state that was widely used in schools. In 1919 he became director of the Jefferson County Historical Society and also served as curator at the James F. D. Lanier Mansion in Madison. Cottman formally retired in 1931, and he and his wife lived with their son in a home on a hilltop overlooking the Ohio River in Madison. Cottman died, at the age of eighty-four, on May 18, 1941.

Before his death, Cottman had confessed to having great satisfaction when he contemplated the shelves in his library devoted to the IMH’s many volumes. On those occasions the editor felt “a little glow of pride,” realizing that numerous students and scholars of Indiana history had been stimulated to write, research, and publish because of his creation. The magazine had done “better than I had dared to hope for,” Cottman said. “I am satisfied.”