Harry McCawley looks and sounds like a small-town character, in the best tradition. “It billed itself as the world’s fastest growing newspaper,” he recalled of his employer, The Republic, when he was hired 49 years ago. McCawley, 71, now associate editor, with a head of white hair and wearing a blue button-down shirt open at the collar, tilted back in his seat, a touch of Mark Twain, Frank Capra and Thornton Wilder in his story. “I got there, and realized that they came by that because they’d only been in business a couple of days,” he said.
The Republic, founded, owned and operated by five generations of a local family, the Browns, is Columbus, Indiana’s hometown daily. Columbus is a city of about 44,000 people, an hour south of Indianapolis.
But Columbus isn’t what you’d call a typical small place. It has more than 70 significant modern buildings designed by many of the 20th century’s greatest architects, including Eliel Saarinen, Eero Saarinen, Cesar Pelli, Charles Gwathmey and Robert Siegel, Richard Meier, Robert Venturi, Kevin Roche and I.M. Pei.
Columbus has six registered National Historic Landmarks of only 2,500 in the country. It is as though Columbus had a fabled ball team who happened to be designers, a Field of Dreams for the drafting-board set. Since the 1940s, when the first modernist structure was built here—a stark, blocky church designed by Eliel Saarinen that looks like a tower in a de Chirico painting—Columbus has been visited and written about by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Geographic, Life, BusinessWeek, Fortune and many others. The story is always the same, a Midwestern version of the Arthurian legend. It goes like this:
J. Irwin Miller, scion of the city’s richest family and young chairman of Cummins, an innovative diesel engine manufacturer founded by his great-uncle, William G. Miller, had a vision to make Columbus the intellectual and economic capital of the exploding postwar corporate landscape: a court of recent Ivy League graduates walking the streets of a contemporary Camelot. Miller started with a building, one that no one would ignore—an elementary school.
Miller envisioned Columbus as a community of diversity, harmony and responsibility, each citizen in a concert of concern. It would be an exceptional place to live, a great place to begin a family.
Architectural Forum called Miller the “Medici of the Midwest,” a pipe-smoking “Yale man” and “Oxford scholar,” a “fiddler” who played a Stradivarius, read the New Testament in ancient Greek, and helped organize the civil rights march on Washington in 1963. Esquire magazine put Miller on its cover in 1967 bearing the proclamation: “This man should be the next President of the United States.” Richard Nixon was, and Miller made his enemies list.
In 1968, the Christian Science Monitor wrote: “By 1985 Columbus may be the subject of investigation by social historians attempting to assess the influence of beautiful schools, churches, and public buildings on a generation of young people who have grown up here.”
Miller died in 2004. Xenia Simons Miller, his wife of 66 years, died in 2009. Their five children gave the Miller House, designed by Eero Saarinen, and its gardens, designed by Daniel Urban Kiley, to the Alberto Cuadra Indianapolis Museum of Art, which now conducts tours. The interior, designed by Alexander Girard, includes a five-foot dollhouse in the living room with ceramic figures depicting a family. The father plays the violin.
There are no more of the Millers in Columbus. Will Miller, 55, the youngest son and the last to leave, moved to New York last year. The family’s bank, Irwin Union Bank and Trust Company, which Will chaired, closed in 2009, collapsed by its involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis. The bank building, designed by Eero Saarinen and dedicated in 1954, was bought by Cummins, now a billion-dollar Fortune 500 company still headquartered in Columbus, a block away from the bank. Saarinen’s building was touted as the first financial institution in America to deploy glass walls and an open floor plan, architectural metaphors for transparency.
Without the Millers, Columbus’ golden era may be over. “We’re sort of left back here by ourselves, to do whatever we’re going to do,” McCawley said.
“My mom owns a bridal shop on Washington Street, and my dad’s deputy chief of EMS for the Fire Department,” said Katie Kutsko over coffee at the Columbus Bar and Grill last February. Kutsko, 18, a tall woman with long, straight hair and a tiny diamond stud in her nose, is the editor-in-chief of The Triangle, Columbus North High School’s student magazine.
In some ways, Columbus is all too typical of a small place. February was Domestic Violence Awareness month, announced on the marquee of the Crump Theater, the city’s late-19th-century opera hall.
The Triangle’s December cover story was “Why Do You Drink?” It included a poll of the student body: More than half surveyed said they drank. The majority reported that they drank at home, not at parties or with friends.
“I interviewed a girl whose mom was an alcoholic,” Kutsko recalled. “The girl started driving at 14 to pick her mother up, so that she wouldn’t be driving drunk.”
In the 2010 census, 32 percent of Columbus’ households included children under age 18. They are 26 percent of the population. As with all places that are “great places to raise kids,” it is precisely those virtues to parents that are vexing to kids.
“I think it’s a good town to grow up in,” Kutsko said of Columbus. “A lot of times kids around here, we complain about how there’s nothing to do. We have to go to Indianapolis if we want to go to concerts or stuff like that. If you live in Columbus and you’re a teenager in Columbus, you have to make your own fun. Last night, I went to my friend’s house. We made pizza—like homemade pizza—and I tried to skateboard and crashed— my knee’s pretty bruised—and watched movies. That’s pretty much all we did, but it was still really fun.”
The Triangle recently published a timeline history of life in Columbus, from the 1950s through the 1990s, as viewed through life in high school. No one mentions architecture.
Kutsko found the presence of design in Columbus not an influence, but an aside to the community, as though the city had pyramids on every corner.
Columbus as a “community that is open in every single respect to persons of every race, color and opinion,” as Miller expressed it in 1964, is a work in progress. Public School Review says the schools reflect the community: 95 percent white. Although there are six modernist churches in a city of many churches, there are no synagogues.
“When I start to complain about diversity, my mom always says, ‘You should have seen it when I was in high school,’” says Kutsko.
As a town, Columbus has few rights to be there. The river it sits on—the east fork of the White River— is not navigable. It floods severely and was malarial until the late 19th century. When Eero Saarinen initially proposed straddling the Millers’ new house across the river at the edge of their property, Fallingwater-style, Xenia Miller asked if he expected her to row her children to school.
The city began life as a purchase of 225 acres from the federal government in 1820 by Brig. Gen. John Tipton, who had been commissioned to select a site for the new state capital. He laid out a town on 30 acres and named it Tiptona. Commissioners renamed it Columbus, and Tipton, apparently hurt, moved away.
“It was a dump,” said Louis Joyner, a local architect who was pivotal in the appeal for the six landmark designations. “I mean, this was not a nice town. It was just a little itty-bitty county seat, and Bartholomew County is not a very rich agricultural area. You look at the original building fabric in Columbus—this is not a town that had good houses. Clearly not a wealthy town. The quality of the downtown buildings is poor to middling. The civic architecture was not impressive, not at all. So why on earth would anyone want to come here?”
The railroad arrived in 1844, on its way north to Indianapolis from Madison. With commerce came the need for banking. In 1871, Joseph I. Irwin, a farmer turned general-store keeper who informally kept a depository for customers, established Irwin’s Bank at 301 Washington Street, where the original building stands today. J. Irwin Miller, his great-grandson, kept his office there.
Irwin and his son William built a family fortune in toll roads, an electric interurban railroad, a starch business, a chain of supermarkets in California and other enterprises. But the last business proved to be its biggest. Miller’s driver, Clessie L. Cummins, told Miller that the mechanic who worked on Miller’s Packard had heard that Sears Roebuck was going to buy diesel engines manufactured on an existing Dutch patent to power farm equipment and trucks. He asked Miller to set him up in business.
Miller put $2.5 million into Cummins Engine Company, which bled red through the 1920s. Sears contracted for 4,500 engines, but the failure rate was so high, Cummins canceled its license on the European patent, and designed its own engine.
In 1934, Miller’s great-nephew, J. Irwin Miller, a shy, childhood stammerer, returned to Columbus from Taft School, Yale, Balliol College at Oxford and a year of sacking potatoes at one of the family’s supermarkets in California. He was installed as vice president and general manager at Cummins. In 1937, the company turned a profit.
World War II made a man of Miller and a business of Cummins. As a Navy lieutenant maneuvering an aircraft carrier in three Pacific battles, Miller “learned that he could hold his own in an outfit his family did not own,” wrote Fortune magazine in 1954. The military placed large orders for the Cummins-powered Red Ball Jeep.
From 1930 to 1950, Columbus’ population doubled, to nearly 20,000. Cummins employed more than 1,700 and there were other Fortune 500 companies too, like Arvin, which manufactured radios.
The transformative interstate highway program made Cummins and the Millers richer. They powered the machinery that built the roads, then powered the trucks that traveled them.
As postwar families increased in size, Columbus was faced with the fact that it had not built a new school in 35 years. The school board rushed toward prefabricated classrooms. At this point, Miller was a husband and father. With other local business leaders, he suggested an alternative: Why not use the problem as an opportunity to provide the very best buildings possible, for the benefit of both students and teachers, and in the process, show the world how progressive a place middle-of-nowhere Columbus actually was?
Like other corporate visionaries of the era, Thomas Watson of IBM in particular, Miller believed the dictating factor for competitive excellence was good design.
Miller’s mother and her sister had been instrumental in building the Tabernacle Church of Christ (now First Christian Church), designed by Eliel Saarinen, in the 1940s. They asked Saarinen to do it, but he told the ladies he didn’t design churches. The family motored to Michigan in the Packard and strong-armed him. Coincidentally, young Miller had been at Yale with Saarinen’s son, Eero, who, with a junior employee of his father’s, Charles Eames, arrived in Columbus to begin work on the church. The four men met to discuss designs at Zaharakos, a turn-of-the-century ice cream parlor on Washington Street that still looks like a scene from The Music Man.
In a pitch that must have sounded a little like Harold Hill to the school board, Miller explained that a foundation Cummins had established to promote “humane living” would pay the architects’ fees on the new schools if the board chose an architect from a list that the foundation provided.
Why architecture? Miller once said, “The influence of architecture with which we are surrounded in our youth affects our lives, our standards, our tastes when we are grown.” He told Architecture magazine that buildings revealed the direction of men’s thoughts, better than words. “You can’t see a spirit or a temperament or a character.” A building, like a face, you could see.
The first school built under the auspices of the foundation’s offer was the Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary School in 1957, designed by Harry Weese, a Chicago architect. Miller sent his children there.
To the present day, the foundation has paid the architects’ fees for more than 20 schools and additions. It has funded the design of apartment complexes, firehouses, golf courses, a post office, a city hall and a county jail.
The idea became the town’s trademark. The Cleo Rogers Memorial Library is an I.M. Pei design from 1968, but it was selected independently by the county library board. St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, a Gunnar Birkerts design from 1988, was built by the congregation to contextualize the new structure with Lincoln Elementary School next door, a foundation-sponsored design also by Birkerts, from 1967.
Miller had his critics. John Morris Dixon, writing in Architectural Forum in 1965, commented, “Isolated masterpieces may make the town famous, but never great.” The Washington Post, the following year, called Miller a “collector.”
Is Columbus’ golden era over? The Cummins Foundation is alive, but not particularly active. Will Miller, who sits on its board, said that it was due for a reassessment of goals. Cummins the company is thriving. Globalization, which has made employment more competitive for many local workers, is instead bringing Columbus the diversity that Miller dreamed of and that Kutsko seeks. Asian and Indian engineers and their families walk the streets of the city now, changing the community in a way that architecture never did. Cummins is building several new facilities downtown designed by Kotter Kim, a Boston firm without the firepower recognition of the names of Columbus’ “dream team” back in the day, but with urban planning and office-systems experience.
And Columbus is thriving. It was rated the country’s top “economic rebounder” from the 2008 recession by the Christian Science Monitor last year.
Like most prairie towns, Columbus is planned on a grid. You go straight in any direction, until there’s no more town. One recent Sunday, a band of skateboarders was practicing on the embankments of the I.M. Pei library, across an empty Fifth Street from the Eliel Saarinen church. At Zaharakos, soldiers in fatigues drank ice cream sodas at the counter and took cellphone photographs of the elderly barhop as she pumped hot fudge. Camp Atterbury, nearby, is an Indiana National Guard training base. Most of the businesses on Washington Street were closed, even the bakery, where in another era you would have picked up your coffee cake after church. From the corner where Saarinen’s Mad Men bank stands, it was as empty and quiet as if there had been a Cold War air-raid drill under way.
Most cities in America own some version of modernism now, from signature museums to office parks, medical clinics and office buildings. It’s difficult at first glance to understand that Columbus is different, that it involves Pritzker Prize winners, landmark designations and an international level of critical discourse. Because it is relatively early modernism, it has started to look old.
Columbus is still a good place to raise a family, says Joyner, a father of four sons, ages 14 to 23. “There’s just that extra level of quality here. There’s a little bit more money, the city’s well-funded, the schools are a little bit better, the buildings are a little bit better, the town’s just got a little bit more. It’s a very easy town to live in.”
According to AARP, it’s also a good place to retire. The organization named Columbus one of the “10 Most Affordable and Livable Places for Retirement” last year.
Will Miller said growing up in Columbus had its pluses and minuses. “The pluses were that it was a small town with all the kind of caring community aspects that you associate with small-town America. The minus was that I was the child of the CEO of the largest industry in town. Every time there was a problem with the union, that caused problems for me at school.” He said the most enduring, mistaken part of the story told about his father and Columbus was that the process of creating the city had been strategic and imposed. And that Miller was its sole author.
“The community had a problem, and Dad was part of a broad conversation trying to figure out how to fix it,” Will Miller said. “They built in a hurry, on the cheap, an elementary school which caused a furor in the community because it was such a lousy facility. Parents revolted. Dad is sitting there thinking, ‘I’m trying to recruit people to live in this little town south of Indianapolis and I’m trying to compete for talent all over the country, and if they hear when they come looking for homes that we’re building these crummy facilities you won’t want to send your children to, I have a business problem.’”
Will Miller added, “He had a creative idea, but no concept of what the long-term implications of that idea might be.”
Did the buildings shape people, as his father believed? “I believe something which is not empirically provable,” he said. “That a quality environment elicits more commitment, more effort, a better enthusiasm level—all the soft things that determine whether you do your best.” Will Miller said there was a grieving process the community had gone through several times, as the Millers slowly removed themselves from Columbus and its affairs.
“I’m a student of history,” he said. “There’s no one place that has maintained something forever. The Medicis passed eventually. Rome passed eventually. Things that people in their time and day thought were good, changed.”
Katie Kutsko talked of leaving Columbus for college in Kansas in the fall. “My hope is that I won’t come back,” she said. “The world’s so big, why would I live in one place for my whole life?”
William L. Hamilton was a senior design reporter for the New York Times. He writes about design for the Wall Street Journal and architecture and design for The Architect’s Newspaper.
Originally published in the October 2012 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
