Bloomington: Limestone, Kinsey, and the World's Greatest College Weekend

You are rolling into Bloomington, Indiana, and nearly everything you see was built, in some sense, from what lies under these hills.

The limestone that runs beneath Monroe County and the surrounding region is called Salem Limestone, or Indiana Oolitic Limestone, and it is one of the most consequential building materials in American history. The Salem formation was laid down roughly three hundred million years ago when this land sat beneath a warm tropical sea. Tiny shell fragments compressed over millennia into a stone so uniform in grain and so tractable under the chisel that architects prize it above almost anything else quarried in the United States. Commercial extraction began in eighteen twenty-seven, when Richard Gilbert opened the first cut near here. But it was the railroad that opened the floodgates. After the New Albany and Salem line pushed through Bloomington in eighteen fifty-four, the stone could reach the entire continent, and builders leapt at it. Today, thirty-five of the fifty current state capitol buildings incorporate Indiana limestone. So does the Pentagon, Washington National Cathedral, the Empire State Building, and a remarkable share of the civic architecture that defines American cities. Waves of Italian and other European stone-carvers immigrated to Bloomington and nearby Bedford to work the quarries, carving ornamental details from the fine-grained pale buff rock.

The university arrived even before the quarries. In eighteen twenty, the state selected Bloomington as the site of Indiana Seminary, which twelve students and a single teacher opened for business in eighteen twenty-five. By eighteen thirty-eight it had been elevated to university status. Indiana University would become one of the great public research institutions in the country, and it left a particular mark on American culture when professor Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist who had made his reputation cataloguing gall wasps, turned his analytical eye toward human sexuality. Kinsey's landmark reports, published in nineteen forty-eight and nineteen fifty-three, shook the nation's assumptions about sexual behavior and were generated from interviews collected right here. The Kinsey Institute he founded, now formally part of Indiana University, still operates as one of the world's leading research centers on human sexuality.

Then there is the Little Five Hundred. In nineteen fifty-one, Indiana University Foundation director Howard Wilcox launched a collegiate bicycle race modeled loosely on the Indianapolis Five Hundred, the race his own father, Howdy Wilcox, had won in nineteen nineteen. More than twenty-five thousand people now travel to Bloomington each April for what the university bills as the World's Greatest College Weekend. The limestone keeps the buildings standing. The university keeps the city alive. Between them, they make Bloomington one of the more quietly essential places in Indiana.