Jerkwater Is a Word That Means Something You Might Not Think It Means | Post 21 | Indiana
Here I am on Jerkwater Rd. outside the jerkwater town of Sheridan, Indiana.
I had to look it up too. But after I did, I was able to work backwards a bit and uncover more of rural western Indiana history than I expected. Let’s start where I ended.
In 1882, the Monon Railroad, a set of track sections spanning Indiana (and intersecting in the northwest town of Monon), came to Sheridan. At the time, residents might still have been referring to Sheridan as Millwood, so-called because the town’s first lot sales went to several mill owners. Only ten years earlier the hamlet had applied for a post office, which was granted, but required a name change because another village to the north had already secured postal service under the name Millwood. It was slow to catch on, but Millwood became Sheridan, after Civil War hero Philip.
The locomotives of the Monon Railroad, as throughout 19th- and much of 20th-century America, ran on steam power. Steam engines of course require quantities of water in their boilers, and unless a tender car carrying a significant supply were hitched to the locomotive, trains would frequently need to stop for water, as often as every 10 miles. As a result, water stations large and small sprung up along railroad tracks with various refilling mechanisms.
In rural parts — in places like Sheridan — a steam locomotive might pull up alongside a simple, unmanned water tank. The boilerman would ensure the train’s basin aligned with the tank’s spigot, lean over to the tank, and jerk a chain to open the spigot. Some water stations didn’t even have a spigot. Boilermen would have to jerk water up from low-lying basins in buckets.
Such were the middle-of-nowhere jerkwaters of the Monon Railroad.
Only 2800 people live in Sheridan today, but industrial and commercial activity followed the Monon Railroad to town — glass factories, canneries, and brickworks — and Street View implies the town is now more than a pit stop. While the outskirts look jerkwater, Sheridan is only 30 miles from Indianapolis; the town’s portion of the railroad is now the walking-and-biking Monon Trail; folks trim their lawns and chat from their cars; downtown and the Twin Kiss Drive In Ice Cream look cute; and school groups bound around the Stuckey Farm playground.
To the west of Sheridan — along a different branch of the old Monon Railroad — matters less jerkwater and more intellectual pervade. Crawfordsville is home to Wabash College, one of only three all-male liberal arts schools in the U.S.
Besides its strong academic reputation, Wabash prides itself on a (slight) winning record over football rival DePauw University (also among the six Indiana colleges once served by the Monon). The schools have played over 120 times since 1890, and ever since 1932 the victor takes home a 300-pound trophy, an old locomotive bell from the Monon Railroad.
Another Crawfordsville historical claim has nothing to do with railroads or football, but early penitentiary design. Downtown, at the corner of Spring and North Washington Streets, stands the Montgomery County Jail and Sheriff’s Residence, site of the first and, today, only operational rotary jail in the U.S.
It’s a museum now, as rotary jails were condemned and almost all closed down in the 1930s. It’s understandable why. Rotary jails featured wedge-shaped cells on a Merry-Go-Round turntable that jailers rotated with a hand crank to a single opening. Crawfordsville’s “pie” (my word, I think, I hope) had 16 cell wedges and was built the same year the Monon came to Sheridan, 1882. The Indiana-based inventors were Victorian social order fanatics who sought “to produce a jail in which prisoners can be controlled without the necessity of personal contact between them and the jailer or guard.”
Alas, during rotation, inmates occasionally got limbs mashed between the cells and exterior walls, and investigators said the Crawfordsville facility was “insecure, unsafe… natural light and ventilation are poor. The revolving cell block offers dark, unsanitary cells for the sixteen men it accommodates.”
Modern Crawfordsville and its environs appear tidy, even if there are some vacancies in the commercial district.
It’s doubtful Crawfordsville was ever derided as a jerkwater, but whether it’s Crawfordsville, Sheridan, Atlanta, Zionsville, or Anderson, Indiana, I’ve generally found you’ve got to keep your eyes open. You might miss a house like this out in the cornfields:
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Muncie, Ind.
- Frankton, Ind.
- Atlanta, Ind.
- Sheridan, Ind.
- Zionsville, Ind.
- Crawfordsville, Ind.
- End: Veedersburg, Ind.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheridan,_Indiana
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