Musings: Belmont

~by Mark Blackwell

If you have ever driven between Nashville and Bloomington, you passed through Belmont, but you probably didn’t notice or stop. Most folks don’t because there’s not much to stop for, these days. But even a hundred years ago there wasn’t much happening either.

Picturesque Brown County Indiana, a guide book from the 1920s, states that Belmont is “A little country store community…located about 8 miles from Nashville.” That’s all they had to say.

An article from the July 1929 edition of the Hoosier Magazine expands our knowledge of the area, somewhat, by reporting that, “State Road No. 46 is daily dragged in winter and is always good in summer.” But still no indication of what Belmont is.

I went online looking for some history of the place. I, of course, went to Wikipedia first and it told me that Belmont is an unincorporated community in Washington Township, Brown County, in the U. S. State of Indiana.” But what about the history of the place?

Well, it goes on to say, “A post office was established in 1884 and discontinued in 1916.” After that, the article veers off to the topic of T.C. Steele and his residence one and a half miles south of Belmont, as did the guide book, and the 1929 magazine article.

Then I came across an article on a website called “Kiddle” under a sub-heading “Belmont, Indiana facts for kids.” There, I found a brief but suspect history of Belmont.

The site stated that, “Belmont was originally the settlement of the Shakers, who quickly died out. However, they left the bell from their church. The bell went with the land in the government auction. The bell remained until 1920 by that time the name Belmont had become official.”

At this point in the narrative, I feel it incumbent on myself to admit that I am a curmudgeon. That is, I am old, cranky, and skeptical. And the afore mentioned article smacked of something made up by a fact deficient sixth grader.

First off, I should explain that the Shakers were a religious sect akin to the Quakers but there were more than a few differences between them. One of the important ones was that the Shakers believed in living communally. And they established a number of communities in North America. They even established one in Indiana but not close to Belmont.

There was a short-lived settlement in Knox County, north of Vincennes. A group of Shakers settled there in 1811, before Indiana was a state, and gave up their Hoosier experiment in 1827, before Brown was a county. And they did not quickly die out, they just dispersed to other, more successful communities back east.

That means there was no Shakers and no bell in Belmont. But there was a Post Office in Belmont from 1884 to 1916. I know this because Wikipedia says so and because I have come into possession of a few postcards that are postmarked, Belmont Ind. 1909.

In fact, I have over a hundred of turn-of-the20th-century postcards that were mailed from places that no longer exist and some that do, like Belmont. At least the idea of Belmont exists. There are signs indicating this. I am having some fun trying to find these places and imagining life in those times and places.

I can only imagine how lonely it must have been for people who lived outside of reasonably sized villages. No internet, no cell phones—in fact there were darned few to no phones at all. What they did have was a little country store and a Post Office. These were probably one and the same.

In most small communities the Post Office was situated in the local general store. They were places to run into a neighbor, buy a sack of flour, and pick up mail—some postcard tokens of affection from the wider world.

My guess is, that when Belmont’s Post Office was abandoned so was the little country store. A Post Office would guarantee some traffic for the store. So, that means that after 1916 there was no longer a community center left, just a name on a sign.

This was cause and effect and happening all over the country. It was around the time that Rural Free Delivery (RFD) was being instituted, so country folks were getting their mail delivered to their doors or at least to their mailboxes. But it must have been a real loss for most people living out in the hills.

Since Belmont is about half way between Nashville and Bloomington that meant that if you got a serious craving for society, you had to travel eight to ten miles to get to a population center.

I know that ten miles doesn’t sound too terrible today but imagine having to travel by buggy or horseback in 1909. I don’t care how well kept the State Road was it couldn’t have been easy going over Kelley Hill to Nashville or climbing the hill out of the Salt Creek valley to get to Bloomington.

The next time you’re headed out on Highway 46 and you come around a curve and see a sign that says Belmont, at least slow down and give a thought to a young girl in another forgotten rural community, who, on a mid-August day, in 1909 received a postcard with a color picture of an attractive young couple, with a caption that said, “I love you.”

I bet she was thrilled silly.