The group had come together to consider forming a historical society for the state of Indiana. Finding themselves in agreement on that intention, the group appointed a committee of seven gentlemen, which included Wallace, Blackford, Holman, and John H. Farnham, an attorney who played an important part in the Society’s infancy, to draft a constitution for the new organization.
After retiring from the assembly for only a few minutes, the committee came back with a draft of a constitution that was speedily adopted. Under the document, the objects of the new Historical Society of Indiana (later known as the Indiana Historical Society) were "the collection of all materials calculated to shed light on the natural, civil, and political history of Indiana, the promotion of useful knowledge, and the friendly and profitable intercourse of such citizens of the state as are disposed to promote the aforesaid objects."
The Society’s activities went through numerous fits and starts throughout the nineteenth century. “Its existence,” noted one official, “has been very quiet--so quiet at times as to suggest death.” Inactive from 1835 to 1848, the Society held only a few meetings between 1848 and 1853 and endured a long period of doldrums from 1859 to 1873. Although the group revived for a bit in the late 1870s, it again went into hibernation as of 1879. Only through the efforts of a group of Hoosier amateur historians did the Society again see the light of day.
One of the men asked to join this new organization was Major Jonathan W. Gordon, an important Indianapolis lawyer made famous through his service as a defense attorney at treason trials held in the state during the Civil War. According to Dunn, it was Gordon, a Society member, who suggested that instead of organizing a new group, the old Indiana Historical Society should instead be reorganized. Dunn and the others were more than happy to oblige.
At a special meeting held on the evening of April 8, 1886, in the Indiana State Library’s rooms on the southeast corner of Tennessee and Market Streets, a group composed of Society members and the new blood successfully reorganized the Society. At that meeting Dunn was selected to be the group’s recording secretary, a post he served in until his death; English was elected president; and Howe became third vice president.
The 1886 organization, however, was quite a different one from the 1830 model. In its new incarnation the Society moved from an open membership to an elite institution, with members elected by secret ballot that required a three-fourths majority (today membership is open to all). This membership requirement, Lana Ruegamer notes in her history of the Society, imitated “other prestigious gentlemen’s clubs in Indianapolis, like the Indianapolis Literary Club and the Contemporary Club.”
Some of those who were able to survive this new standard and become Society members in the coming months included Hoosier author Maurice Thompson, Indiana University president David Starr Jordan, Franklin judge D. D. Banta, and former governor Albert G. Porter. To ensure that the Society’s transformation would be complete, the “new” members approved a resolution at a special meeting held nine days after the Society had been revitalized that any of the old members who “fail to pay their dues for the current year within 30 days from this date be dropped from the rolls and be no longer members.” All of this worked to keep the institution’s membership small (only eighty-nine by 1907).
The newly revamped Society continued to be plagued by some of the same problems encountered by the old organization, especially when it came to finding suitable office space. “We have never been able to get a room where we could keep anything,” Dunn reminisced at the first State Historical Conference in 1919. “We do not have the money to rent a room, and have never been able to keep a room in the State House or the [Marion County] Court House.”
Through his political connections, however, Dunn obtained a small office, which was also used as a janitor’s storeroom, for the Society in the Indianapolis City Hall. Since this area was kept unlocked for several years over the protests of Society officers, the group could not meet its original goal—preserving Indiana historical materials for use by researchers in years to come. Dunn had the solution. “The only way to save anything,” he said, “is to put it into print as quickly as possible.”
As early as the original meeting when the Society was revitalized, Dunn had been pushing for the group to publish matter on Indiana history. He introduced a resolution, adopted by those assembled, authorizing the executive committee to contract on the Society’s behalf “with any reliable publishing firm for the publication of papers under the auspices of the Society; provided, that no cost or risk of publication shall fall on the Society.”
Luckily for the Society, Indianapolis was the home of a very reputable publishing house, the Bowen-Merrill Company (later Bobbs-Merrill), publisher for such Hoosier literary giants as James Whitcomb Riley, the famed Hoosier Poet, and Meredith Nicholson, author of the best-selling The House of a Thousand Candles. Under the arrangement between the Society and the publisher, Bowen-Merrill printed the Society’s publications free of charge and supplied the organization with one hundred complimentary copies. Also, Bowen-Merrill paid the historical organization a 10 percent royalty if sales went above two hundred copies.
The Society’s publications program also benefited from having a person like Dunn on hand as a writer of articles and as a historical detective tracking down for publication Society minutes and papers read before the group during its first fifty-six years of existence. “At such a task of discovery and collection,” said James A. Woodburn of Indiana University, who prepared a history of the Society’s first one hundred years, “Dunn was an adept. He had a historical scent and could follow a trail to its source.”
Dunn spent ten years in tracking down the necessary material, a “long and trying” search, he remembered. For example, several years passed before he could find any trace of a paper by John B. Dillon on the national decline of the MiamiIndians. According to Dunn, tradition had it that the lecture had been printed in a Cincinnati newspaper. A search of the newspaper’s files for the six months following the lecture’s delivery failed to produce a copy.
By chance English happened to come into possession of a fragment of the address, but it had no date or the name of the newspaper. Dunn discovered, however, that the type corresponded to that used by the Cincinnati Gazette. Upon further investigation, he found “on the back of the slip, where the columns slightly overlapped, the letters ‘t 28,’ which were guessed to be the remnants of a date line, and could mean, of course, nothing but August 28. By this clue the article was easily found as printed some fifteen months after its delivery.”
Finally, in 1897, eleven years following the publication of Volume 2, featuring the new Society’s early works, Volume 1 of the Society’s Publications appeared, which included nearly all its material from 1830 to 1886. The Society continues to publish material on the state’s history through books and periodicals from the IHS Press.
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