Indiana

The 19th state

Indiana began as part of the Northwest Territory. In 1800 Congress carved out the Indiana Territory, with its capital at Vincennes, an old French town on the Wabash River. The territorial government moved to Corydon, near the Ohio River, in 1813, and in June 1816 delegates met there to write a state constitution, by tradition sometimes working in the shade of a large elm because of the summer heat. On December 11, 1816, Indiana became the 19th state.

A name borrowed from Virginia

“Indiana” simply means “land of the Indians,” formed by adding a Latin-style ending to “Indian.” The name has an odd history. It was first used around 1768 for a tract of nearly 5,000 square miles in what is now West Virginia, which the Iroquois Six Nations granted to a Philadelphia trading company. When Virginia’s claim to the land won out, the name fell out of use, and in 1800 Congress reused it for the new territory west of Ohio.

Hoosiers

People from Indiana have been called Hoosiers since at least the 1830s, when John Finley’s 1833 poem “The Hoosier’s Nest” made the word popular. Nobody knows for certain where it came from. Theories range from a man named Hoosier who hired Indiana workers to the greeting “Who’s here?”, but the historian Jacob Piatt Dunn traced it to a word in English dialect for a hill dweller or a rough countryman. “The Hoosier State” is Indiana’s traditional nickname, though no law makes it official.

A capital in the middle

As settlers pushed north from the Ohio River, Corydon, in the far south, was no longer central. In 1820 a commission chose a site in the wilderness where Fall Creek meets the White River, near the middle of the state, and the General Assembly named it Indianapolis. The capital moved there on January 1, 1825. Corydon’s old capitol became the county courthouse and is now a state historic site. The capital page tells the story.

Crossroads of America

Indiana’s motto, “The Crossroads of America,” was adopted in 1937 and describes its place at the junction of major roads and railroads. The state song is “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” written in 1897 by Paul Dresser, the brother of novelist Theodore Dreiser, who spelled the family name differently.

Symbols

Indiana has 16 official symbols, a short list compared with many states. The cardinal has been the state bird since 1933, and the peony the state flower since 1957, replacing the zinnia. The tulip tree, one of the tallest hardwoods in the East, is the state tree, and its leaf appears in the border of the state seal. Salem limestone, the stone used for the Empire State Building and many other landmarks, is the state stone. Newer additions include Say’s firefly, proposed by a second grader, the P-47 Thunderbolt warplane, built in Evansville during World War II, and the mastodon, the state fossil since 2022. See every symbol on the Indiana symbols page.

The flag shows a gold torch surrounded by 19 stars on a blue field; the largest star stands for Indiana as the 19th state.

Land and people

Indiana covers 36,420 square miles, 38th among the states, and had about 6.97 million residents in 2025, 17th in the country. It borders Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois, touches Lake Michigan in the northwest, and follows the Ohio River along its southern edge. Indianapolis, with about 901,000 people, is the largest city by far, followed by Fort Wayne, Evansville and the fast-growing Indianapolis suburbs of Carmel and Fishers.