Kokomo history you can still visit: landmarks and local traditions

Kokomo's history is unusually easy to visit. A Miami village site, a gas-lit mansion, an inventor's house and a park full of oddities are all within a few miles of the courthouse, and the city keeps adding chapters, from a new conference center downtown to this fall's lectures on the people who were here first.

The Miami and the founding

Before there was a town, this was Miami land along Wildcat Creek. The city marks the reported site of a Miami village near West Harrison and South Main streets, home to the leader whose name the city carries, and a cenotaph honoring him was dedicated in 1911 in the 400 block of Purdum Street. Records of the man himself are thin. A Miami signer of an 1834 treaty, written down as Co-come-wah, is thought to be him, and the meaning of the name has never been traced to a known Miami word.

The trader David Foster laid out the town in 1844, and the commissioners of what was then Richardville County approved its first plat that October under the spelling "Kocomo." Within a few years, the Miami were forcibly removed from Indiana in 1846 and 1847, and Foster's later testimony in the 1870s became part of the record used to settle land rights. Kokomo incorporated as a town in 1855.

On November 18, the Howard County Historical Society closes its America at 250 lecture series with Logan York, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, speaking on Miami history and culture at the Kokomo Conference Center.

Landmarks you can visit

The Seiberling Mansion on West Sycamore Street is where most people start. Monroe Seiberling, enriched by the natural gas boom, built it between 1889 and 1891 in a mix of Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne styles, and it was first lit and heated by gas. Indiana University used it as its Kokomo campus from 1946 to 1964; since the early 1970s it has been the Howard County Museum, with the Elliott House and the society's archives on the same grounds.

The Elwood Haynes Museum on South Webster Street is the former home of the man behind the city's nickname. Haynes, already known in Indiana's gas industry, hired Elmer and Edgar Apperson to build his horseless carriage in Kokomo in the 1890s, began commercial production in 1898 and later patented the cobalt-chromium alloys he called Stellite. Today the city runs it as a museum open for a free-will donation.

Highland Park, the city's 83-acre park on West Defenbaugh Street, collects several landmarks in one place: Old Ben, a steer who grew to more than two tons (4,585 or 4,720 pounds by the city's records) before his death in 1910; the hollow stump of a sycamore that stood along Wildcat Creek for some 800 years; a restored Civil War cannon; and the Vermont Covered Bridge, which the city says is the last Smith Type #3 truss bridge in Indiana.

Downtown, the Kokomo Courthouse Square Historic District and the Lake Erie and Western Depot Historic District were both listed on the National Register in 2008. The restored depot on North Buckeye Street is now home to Marble The Steakhouse, so a dinner there comes with a seat in a railroad building. Around the square, Palmer's Jewelry has been in business since 1944, part of a run of family storefronts on East Sycamore Street. The city's Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 2002 at Championship Park, carries veterans' names in its walkway bricks.

Traditions that carry the story

Some of Kokomo's history lives in its calendar. Each holiday season the Historical Society dresses the Seiberling Mansion for Christmas at the Seiberling, which by its own description opens the Saturday after Thanksgiving with a lighting ceremony and runs through the end of the year. The city's Christmas parade, this year themed Miracle on Main Street, comes down Main Street on Saturday, December 5, with Santa visiting children afterward.

Summer brings Mr. Kingston's Auto Exhibition, named for George Kingston, whose estate owned the Seiberling Mansion until 1946. The free show parks almost 40 pre-1950s cars on the mansion lawn, with vintage fashion and antique toys, and the society has already set the next one for July 23 and 24, 2027. On July 4 this year, residents marked the nation's 250th anniversary with a community reading of the Declaration of Independence, and students at the Kokomo Area Career Center made public art for the anniversary that the city unveiled in May.

Where to learn more

The Howard County Museum closes for two weeks in mid-November and for all of January, so check its schedule before you go. Its archives behind the Elliott House are open by appointment. The Kokomo-Howard County Public Library's family and local history department, at the main library on North Union Street, offers genealogy resources, and the city's historic sites page lists its landmarks. The new Kokomo Conference Center on East Superior Street, opened in September, includes an automotive gallery on the city's car-building past.

Kokomo's past is close at hand. Pick one landmark a weekend and the whole story comes together by spring.