The First Union Station

On September twentieth, eighteen fifty-three, a crowd gathered at a new brick building on Indianapolis's south side. Six separate railroads had agreed to share a single facility, something almost unheard of in the United States at the time. They called it a union station, meaning a place where multiple lines joined. By doing so, Indianapolis accidentally invented a category of American architecture.

The city had been reaching for the railroads since the eighteen forties, partly out of ambition and partly out of desperation. The White River, which was supposed to be the economic engine of the new capital, was too shallow for reliable commerce. The railroads were not. By the time the Union Depot opened, eight main rail lines passed through Indianapolis, with roughly forty smaller ones serving towns across Indiana. The city that had struggled with its geography had become the center of a web.

During the Civil War, that web mattered. Indianapolis functioned as a major logistics hub for Union armies operating in the western campaigns. Troops moved through it; supplies moved through it; the Indianapolis Union Station became one of the places where the war was organized from the inside. By eighteen seventy, the station was processing eighty trains a day, nearly two million passengers a year.

The original building was replaced in eighteen eighty-eight with a larger Romanesque structure, which still stands. The phrase that would eventually define Indiana and appear on every license plate, Crossroads of America, came from the same convergence the railroads created. Indianapolis was at the literal center of the routes, and the routes made the city. The old idea of the White River as destiny had been quietly forgotten.