Richmond, Indiana: Quakers, the Underground Railroad, and a City Block That Exploded

Richmond, Indiana, sits on the Ohio-Indiana line along what used to be the National Road, and its character was shaped almost entirely by the people who founded it: Quakers.

In eighteen oh six, two North Carolina Friends, John Smith and Jeremiah Cox, arrived on the gorge cliffs of the Whitewater River. Within three years, nearly three hundred more Quakers followed from the Carolinas, most of them farmers uncomfortable living in a slave society and drawn north by the cheap fertile land of the new Northwest Territory. They called their settlement Smithville, then incorporated it in eighteen eighteen as Richmond.

The Quaker ethic ran deep here. It meant co-education at Earlham College, founded in eighteen forty-seven, one of the earliest American colleges to admit women alongside men from the start. It meant one of the nation's first public libraries, opened in eighteen sixty-four. And it meant the Underground Railroad. Jeremiah Cox's farm was a documented stop on the route north. Levi Coffin, known as the President of the Underground Railroad, lived just north of Richmond in what is now Fountain City, and sheltered more than two thousand freedom seekers in passages hidden beneath his home.

For more than a century, Richmond was known as the Rose City, a center for commercial rose cultivation that supplied greenhouses across the eastern United States.

Then, on April sixth, nineteen sixty-eight, two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and when national news was elsewhere, a natural gas leak ignited in the basement of a sporting goods store in downtown Richmond. The resulting explosion leveled more than a city block, killing forty-one people including seven children. It remains one of the deadliest urban disasters in Indiana's history. Four hundred ninety-seven lawsuits were filed. The gas company was found solely liable.

Richmond today is a small city of about thirty-five thousand, anchored still by Earlham College and the memory of a community that decided, two centuries ago, that conscience was worth the cost of moving.