In 1806 the first European Americans in the area,
Quaker families from the state of
North Carolina, settled along the East Fork of the
Whitewater River. This was part of a general westward migration in the early decades after the
American Revolution. John Smith was one of the earliest settlers. Richmond is still home to several Quaker institutions, including
Friends United Meeting,
Richmond Friends School,
Earlham College and the
Earlham School of Religion. The first post office in Richmond was established in 1818 with Robert Morrison as the first postmaster. The town was officially incorporated in 1840, with John Sailor elected the first mayor. Early cinema and television pioneer
Charles Francis Jenkins grew up on a farm north of Richmond, where he began inventing useful gadgets. As the Richmond Telegram reported, on June 6, 1894, Jenkins gathered his family, friends and newsmen at his cousin's jewelry store in downtown Richmond and projected a filmed motion picture for the first time in front of an audience. The motion picture was of a vaudeville entertainer performing a butterfly dance, which Jenkins had filmed himself. Jenkins filed for a patent for the Phantoscope projector in November 1894 and it was issued in March 1895. A modified version of the Phantoscope was later sold to
Thomas Edison, who named it
Edison's Vitascope and began projecting motion pictures in New York City
vaudeville theaters, raising the curtain on American cinema.
Joseph E. Maddy is credited with founding the country's first complete high school orchestra at Richmond, and later founded the National High School Orchestra Camp, which became the
Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.
Hoagy Carmichael recorded "
Stardust" for the first time in Richmond at the
Gennett recording studio. Famed trumpeter and singer
Louis Armstrong was first recorded at Gennett as a member of
King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band. Many other internationally famous musicians recorded at Gennett's Richmond facility, including
Jelly Roll Morton,
Bix Beiderbecke,
Duke Ellington, and
Fats Waller. Gennett also recorded Klan musicians. A group of artists in the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came to be known as the
Richmond Group. They included
John Elwood Bundy,
Charles Conner,
George Herbert Baker,
Maude Kaufman Eggemeyer and
John Albert Seaford. The
Richmond Art Museum has a collection of regional and American art. Many consider the most significant painting in the collection to be a self-portrait of Indiana-born
William Merritt Chase. '', one of a series of 12 identical monuments dedicated to the spirit of
pioneer women in the United States The city was connected to the
National Road, the first road built by the federal government and a major route west for pioneers of the 19th century. It became part of the system of
National Auto Trails. The highway is now known as
U.S. Route 40. One of the extant
Madonna of the Trail monuments was dedicated at Richmond on October 28, 1928. It sits in a corner of Glen Miller Park adjacent to
US 40. Richmond's cultural resources include two of Indiana's three
Egyptian mummies. One is held by the Wayne County Historical Museum and the other by Earlham College's Joseph Moore Museum, leading to the local nickname "Mummy capital of Indiana". The arts were supported by a strong economy increasingly based on manufacturing. Richmond was once known as "the lawnmower capital" because it was a center for manufacturing of
lawnmowers from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. Manufacturers included Davis,
Motomower,
Dille-McGuire and F&N. The farm machinery builder
Gaar-Scott was based in Richmond. The
Davis Aircraft Co., builder of a light
parasol wing monoplane, operated in Richmond beginning in 1929. After starting out in nearby
Union City, Wayne Agricultural Works moved to Richmond. Wayne manufactured horse-drawn vehicles, including the "
kid hack", a precursor of the motorized
school bus. From the early 1930s through the 1940s, Richmond had several automobile designers and manufacturers. Among the automobiles locally manufactured were the
Richmond, built by the Wayne Works; the "Rodefeld"; the
Davis; the
Pilot; the
Westcott; and the
Crosley. In the 1950s Wayne Works changed its name to
Wayne Corporation, by then a well-known bus and school-bus manufacturer. In 1967 it relocated to a site adjacent to
Interstate 70. The company was a leader in school-bus safety innovations, but closed in 1992 during a period of school-bus manufacturing industry consolidations. Richmond was known as the "
Rose City" because of the many varieties once grown there by Hill's Roses. The company had several sprawling complexes of
greenhouses, with a total of about under glass. The annual Richmond Rose Festival honored the rose industry and was a popular summer attraction.
Downtown explosion On April 6, 1968, an explosion triggered by a natural gas leak destroyed or damaged several downtown blocks and killed 41 people; more than 150 were injured. The event is documented in the book
Death in a Sunny Street: The Civil Defense Story of the Richmond, Indiana Disaster, April 6, 1968, compiled by Esther Kellner. ==Geography==