Fort Harrison: The Federal Footprint

by bam

A cited, high-school-and-up site course on Fort Benjamin Harrison, the Army post northeast of Indianapolis that opened in 1908, trained officers in two world wars, held prisoners of war, ran the Army's money for forty years, closed under base realignment, and became a state park, a redevelopment district and a federal finance center all on the same ground. Course 6 of the Indianapolis cluster, and the one that asks what happens to a city when the federal government is the landowner. You will learn how a post is laid out and how to read rank off a street, why federal land pays no property tax and what a school district gets instead, how the base closure commission was built so that no member of Congress could save a single base, and how a public benefit conveyance decided that two thirds of this ground would be public forest rather than subdivisions. The segregation question is handled the way the record allows: two documented items specific to this post, and a plain list of what the preservation documents do not say. You will look up a real parcel, find who actually zones it, and write a piece of grounded nonfiction. A virtual tour of the post is planned and will be added to the Now section when it is published.