From the wooded green hill country along the Ohio River to the stretches of sandy dunes on Lake Michigan's south shore, Indiana is a state of striking contrasts. In this state, which calls itself the Crossroads of America, a 19th-century covered bridge on a lonely road in Parke County is minutes away from the junction of four superhighways at Indianapolis. Just beyond Indiana's rich farmlands, where cattle and hogs and soybeans thrive, is the sudden glow of steel mills that spotlights the state's huge industrial complex in the north.
Indiana has the beauty of the moonlight on the Wabash and mysterious underground caverns. It has the romance of towns named for such faraway places as Brazil, Holland, Mexico, and Peru; villages with offbeat names like Gnaw Bone and Pinhook and Popcorn. It also has the ugliness of urban slums and scarred hills slashed by strip mining. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the showcase for the fastest cars on Earth, and Indiana is the state where everyone goes wild at basketball tourney time.
Indiana ranks high as a manufacturing state largely due to the industrial Calumet district along the shores of Lake Michigan in the northwest. Part of the Chicago industrial area, the district was one of the great steel-producing centers of the nation. Other Indiana cities turn out electrical machinery, metals, transportation equipment, machinery, food products, and chemicals and allied products. The northern half of the state lies in the fertile corn belt of the Midwest. Only four states grow more corn for grain than Indiana. In most years Indiana also ranks high in a variety of other farm products, including soybeans, hay, popcorn, hogs, cattle and calves, milk, and eggs.
Indiana is named from the word Indian, and with the addition of the letter a it means Indian land. Its nickname is the Hoosier State, a term of uncertain origin. One theory is that it comes from an old Saxon word meaning hill dweller, because many early settlers of the area were the children of English highlanders. The nickname might be a version of the pioneers' greeting Who's yere? (Who is here?). It has also been dated to the 1820s, when Samuel Hoosier, a contractor on the Ohio Falls Canal in Kentucky, preferred to hire workmen from the Indiana side of the river. They were first called Hoosier's Men and then just Hoosiers.
Between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, Indiana lies in the North Central region of the United States. It is bordered on the north by Michigan and on the northwest by Lake Michigan. To the west is Illinois, separated from Indiana in part by the Wabash River. On the south the Ohio River is the boundary line between Indiana and Kentucky. Ohio is to the east. Indiana's greatest length, from north to south, is 265 miles (426 kilometers). Its greatest width is 160 miles (257 kilometers). The state's shoreline along Lake Michigan extends 45 miles (72 kilometers). The total area is 36,185 square miles (93,719 square kilometers), including 253 square miles (655 square kilometers) of inland water surface. The state's Lake Michigan area is 228 square miles (591 square kilometers). Indiana has the smallest area of any state west of the Appalachian Highlands except Hawaii.
