Place:Linton, Greene, Indiana, United States

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source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Linton is a city in Stockton Township, Greene County, Indiana, United States. The population was 5,413 at the 2010 census. A coal mining city, it is located southeast of Terre Haute. The current mayor is John Wilkes.

Linton is part of the Bloomington, Indiana, Metropolitan Statistical Area.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Linton was essentially founded around the entrepreneuring of John W. Wines, who first sold goods in the Linton area, briefly in 1831. Although he would later relocate to Fairplay, Indiana, he returned and opened a general store in Linton in 1837. He would later build a small horse mill as well as a tannery, and started a recurring fur trade with the French in Vincennes. The city itself was officially chartered and named in June 1850, laid out by Hannah E. Osborn and Isaac V. Coddington. In the late 19th century, small underground coal mines began to appear near and almost inside the city and the population expanded rapidly. At the turn of the 20th century, the population was larger than it is today. At one point in the 1920s, there were at least 35 drinking establishments and an equal number of churches.

In the 1920s, small surface mines began to predominate, and their small, unreclaimed hills and strip-pit lakes still surround the city. The lakes have provided a regular, if limited, amount of fishing tourism for decades. Signs of the underground mines remain as well, including tipples on private land and sinkholes that appear regularly on private property, roads and even within the city limits. By the 1940s, the underground mines were gone and the small surface mines had moved on or been consumed by large corporations such as Peabody Coal Company. These mines were the primary employers well into the 1980s.

In 1952, General Electric built a factory on the southeast side of the city. This factory employed several hundred until the mid-1980s, when General Electric phased out most of their small motors production in the U.S. The building remains empty due to EPA regulations.

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