Musings
~by Mark Blackwell
Belmont I
f 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,
36 Our Brown County • May/June 2022
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
