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School children in pioneer Indiana enjoyed one holiday tradition that teachers will most likely be thankful they no longer have to endure.
Having marked Nashville’s centennial as “The Art Colony of the Midwest” in 2007, it’s easy to forget that the Brown County village was not always the epicenter of the visual arts in Indiana. A significant regional school of painting developed in the Wayne County town of Richmond in the late nineteenth century, of which the Richmond Palette Club and the Richmond Prize were manifestations.
In 1900, T.C. Steele’s landscape The Bloom of the Grape , painted on-site in Indiana’s Muscatatuck Valley just a few years earlier, won an honorable mention at the Paris Universal Exposition. The painters who were putting Indiana on the map at the turn of the twentieth century were members of a transitional generation.
During the holidays, radio listeners around the nation get their fill of pop tunes about Santa, reindeer and Grandma, in no particular order. Secular holiday music with a rock-and-roll beat is so ubiquitous now that it’s hard to imagine the season without it.
Toward the end of the 1960s, a diminishing tax base and a deteriorating downtown prompted Indianapolis civic leaders to push for measures that would revive the city. In 1970, the Indiana state legislature provided for the consolidation of the governments of Indianapolis and Marion County.