Hindostan Falls

The story

Hindostan Falls was one of the largest towns in frontier Indiana and, for a few years, the seat of Martin County. It was founded in 1816 at the falls of the East Fork of the White River by an English immigrant, Caleb Fellows, who named it after Hindustan, having served with the British East India Company. Water power built it: sawmills and gristmills lined the falls, a ferry crossed the river, and the flat riverbed sandstone was quarried into grindstones and whetstones shipped across the region. By 1820 roughly 1,200 people lived there.

Then, in the early 1820s, an epidemic — remembered as cholera or a summer fever — swept the town. Court records describe well over a hundred deaths in a matter of months, and within a few years most of the survivors had died or fled, some also driven off by a sharp economic depression. The county seat was moved away in 1828, and Hindostan Falls collapsed almost completely. Local legend adds mass graves and buried treasure to the story; those belong to folklore, but the sudden emptying of the town is documented fact.

The state owns the site today as a fish and wildlife area. The clearest trace of the town is the flat rock at the falls, pocked with 128 square holes cut to anchor the vanished mills.

What remains today

The falls and the flat riverbed rock, drilled with 128 square mill-anchor holes; otherwise woods and river, with no standing buildings.