Indiana's First Capital: The Elm Tree Convention

The small town of Corydon, tucked into the limestone hills of southern Indiana, holds a distinction most people driving past never realize: this is where Indiana was born.

The town was platted in eighteen oh eight and named for a shepherd in a poem favored by William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory. In eighteen thirteen the territorial capital moved south from Vincennes to Corydon, which sat more centrally within the shrunken territory.

Then in June of eighteen sixteen, forty-three delegates from Indiana's thirteen counties converged on Corydon to write a state constitution. The courthouse was too small for the assembly, so the delegates spent much of their time working under a massive elm tree in the town square, drafting the document that would make Indiana the nineteenth state in the Union. They finished in nineteen days. The constitution they wrote prohibited slavery, promised free public education, and named Corydon the seat of government of the new state.

On December eleventh, eighteen sixteen, Indiana entered the Union, with Corydon as its capital.

The capital stayed here until eighteen twenty-five, when the state government moved to the more centrally located Indianapolis. Corydon went back to being a small county seat in Harrison County.

The Constitutional Elm, as the tree came to be called, stood for generations as a living monument to that summer. It finally died in nineteen twenty-five, over a century after the convention beneath its branches. Today a stone marks its location in the town square. The original statehouse, a small limestone building completed in eighteen sixteen, still stands downtown, one of the oldest surviving state capitol buildings in the country.