Noblesville: The Fur Trader, the Lenape Wife, and the Living History That Followed

The story of Noblesville begins with a man who lived between two worlds and ultimately had to choose one.

William Conner was born in Ohio in seventeen seventy-seven and grew up among Moravian missionaries and Delaware people, absorbing both cultures with equal fluency. Around eighteen hundred he moved to central Indiana as a fur trader and established himself along the eastern bank of the White River. There he married Mekinges, the daughter of Chief William Anderson, leader of the Unalatchgo Lenape people. They built a life together and had six children.

Conner was not only a trader but a negotiator, and his bilingual fluency made him indispensable to American officials seeking to open Indiana to white settlement. He participated in treaty negotiations that, by eighteen eighteen, had transferred to the United States government the land that would become Hamilton County. The cost to the Delaware and Lenape people was removal. In eighteen twenty, Mekinges and the couple's six children left for the west with the rest of her people. Conner stayed. He remarried quickly, a woman named Elizabeth Chapman, and turned to building the county he had helped create.

Along with his partner Josiah Polk, Conner platted the town of Noblesville in eighteen twenty-three. The settlement became the county seat of Hamilton County the following year. The town's name remains disputed: some historians believe it honors Senator James Noble of Indiana; others hold that Josiah Polk named it for Lavinia Noble, a woman he was briefly engaged to. Nobody knows for certain.

Conner's brick house, completed by eighteen twenty-three on his White River farmstead, still stands. It became the seed of what is now Conner Prairie, one of the most highly regarded living history museums in the United States, where visitors can encounter re-enactors representing the full texture of early Indiana life, including the Lenape people whose land this was before the treaties Conner helped negotiate swept them away.

Noblesville is Hamilton County's seat and has grown into one of the fastest-expanding suburban cities in Indiana, its population swelling in the orbit of Indianapolis. But the courthouse square it built in the eighteen twenties remains, and the complicated story of William Conner, the man who founded the city while helping to erase the people who preceded it, endures as one of the more honest windows into how the American Midwest came to be.