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Cities Near Richmond, IN
614 S 14th St
Richmond, IN (in city)
2 Bed, 2 Bath
Home
1056 sq.ft.
408 S O St
Richmond, IN (in city)
2 Bath
Commercial
2500 sq.ft.
33 S 23rd St
Richmond, IN (in city)
3 Bed, 1+ Bath
Home
1548 sq.ft.
5697 Paint Rd
New Paris, OH (5.5 miles)
2 Bed, 1 Bath
Home
1472 sq.ft.
Local city information for Richmond, IN
Richmond () is a city in Wayne Township, Wayne County, in east central Indiana, which borders Ohio. The city also includes the Richmond Municipal Airport in Boston Township which is separated from the rest of the city. It is sometimes called the "cradle of recorded jazz" because some early jazz records originated there at the studio of Gennett Records, a division of the Starr Piano Company. Richmond is the county seat of Wayne County. The city's 2000 population was 39,124. In the 1990s, Richmond's population declined by 1.6 percent.
Richmond was settled along the East Fork of the Whitewater River in 1806 by Quaker families from North Carolina. John Smith and David Hoover were among the earliest settlers. Richmond is still home to several Quaker institutions including Friends United Meeting, Earlham College and the Earlham School of Religion.
Richmond is believed to have been the smallest community in the United States with a professional opera company and symphony orchestra. The Whitewater Opera has since closed its doors but the Richmond Symphony Orchestra is a source of community pride. Will Earhart formed the first complete high school orchestra in Richmond in 1899. A later orchestra director, Joseph E. Maddy went on to found what is now known as the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.
A significant group of artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came to be known as the Richmond Group. The list of artists includes John Elwood Bundy, Charles Conner, George Herbert Baker, Maude Kaufman Eggemeyer and John Albert Seaford among others. The Richmond Art Museum has an outstanding collection of regional and American art. Many consider the most significant painting in the collection to be a self portrait of Indiana-born William Merritt Chase.
Richmond was once known as "the lawnmower capital" because of the lawn mowers manufactured there from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. Manufacturers included Davis, Motomower, Dille-McGuire and F&N. The farm machinery
builder Gaar-Scott was based in Richmond.
In the 1920s, Indiana had the strongest Ku Klux Klan organization in the country under Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson, with control over the state legislature and an ally in Governor Ed Jackson. At its height, national membership during the second Klan movement reached 1.5 million, with 300,000 from Indiana. Records show that Richmond (home to Whitewater Klan #60) and Wayne County were Klan strongholds, with up to 45 percent of the county's white males having been Klan members. At the same time Gennett Records was recording important black jazz artists, it also produced private-label contract recordings for the Ku Klux Klan. An aspect of official racial segregation existed in Richmond as late as 1965 when the city ended its policy of restricting black firefighters to one station and limiting the promotion opportunities of firefighters and police officers.
After starting out in nearby Union City, Wayne Agricultural Works moved to Richmond. Wayne was a manufacturer of horse-drawn vehicles, including "kid hacks", a precursor of the motorized school bus. Beginning in the early 1930s through the 1940s, several automobile designers and manufacturers were located in Richmond. Among the automobiles manufactured there was the "Richmond" which was built by the Wayne Works, the "Rodefeld", the "Davis", the "Pilot", the Westcott and the Crosley.
In the 1950s, Wayne Works became Wayne Corporation, a well-known bus and school bus manufacturer, and relocated to a site adjacent to Interstate 70 in 1967. The company was a leader in school bus safety innovations, but closed in 1992 during a period of school bus manufacturing industry consolidations.
Richmond was known as the Rose City because of the many varieties once grown there by Hill's Roses in several sprawling complexes of greenhouses. The company once had about under glass. The Richmond Rose Festival honored the rose industry and was a popular summer attraction.
Richmond is located on the National Road, which became part of the system of National Auto Trails. The highway is now known as U.S. Highway 40. One of the extant Madonna of the Trail monuments was dedicated at Richmond on October 28, 1928 The monument sits in a corner of Glen Miller Park adjacent to US 40.
On April 6, 1968, several downtown blocks were destroyed or damaged by a natural gas explosion and fire, killing 41 people and injuring more than 150. Thereafter, the main street through downtown was closed to traffic and the Downtown Promenade was built in 1972 (and later expanded in 1978). The book Death in a Sunny Street is about the event. The five-block pedestrian mall was later torn down and the street reopened to traffic in 1997 as part of an urban revitalization effort.
A Powerball lottery ticket sold in Richmond won approximately $314 million (annuity value) in the August 25, 2007 drawing. In 1998, a group of 13 machine-shop workers from Ohio won Powerball on a ticket that had also been purchased in Richmond. It won $295.7 million (annuity). The two tickets were sold at two different Speedway convenience stores about three miles (5 km) apart; both sets of winners also chose the cash option.
Richmond is home to two of Indiana's three Egyptian mummies, giving it the highest concentration of mummies in the state. One is located at the Wayne County Historical Museum and another at Earlham College's Joseph Moore Museum.
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