Along with reading archived local newspapers, much of my research for ByGone Muncie involves studying maps. Luckily our community has no shortage of cartographic repositories, including Ball State’s GIS Research and Map Collection and Bracken Library’s Digital Media Repository.

Delaware County’s Office of Information and GIS Services’ website offers tons of resources including 200 years of local plat maps. Then there’s Muncie Map Co., co-owned by the gifted cartographer Andy Shears. I have many Map Co. maps strewn about my house and office. Sometimes it’s just easier (and more fun) to explore physical copies.

Historical maps provide all kinds of valuable info, snapshots in time marking how we’ve deployed across the landscape. If, say, we want to know what buildings existed at a specific address, or how we’ve developed a certain area in Delaware County, there’s (usually) a map that has some of the particulars. Such maps help illuminate past eras, even revealing antiquated place names long abandoned.

One such obsolete toponym was the ‘McKinley Reserve,’ the original name for the 20-acre tract of land now home to St. Mary Catholic Church and St. Michael Catholic School. In the years before the Indiana Gas and Oil Boom (1886-1910), Joseph W. McKinley’s farm sprawled across this section of Center Township, just north of the Jackson Street Pike. McKinley made a tidy sum during the boom, erecting gas wells across his property.

He also sold huge tracts of land to the Delaware County Improvement Company who first platted the ‘Westside Addition to Muncie’ in 1889. The original Westside stretched south from what is now Ball State’s Quad to the river, between Tillotson and the aptly named McKinley Avenue. Like Avondale, Congerville, Industry, and Whitely, developers planned Westside as a blue-collar factory suburb. Delaware County Improvement advertised the available land with flambeaux, extravagantly wasteful displays of burning natural gas. The Morning News reported in 1889 that at a company banquet, “natural gas torches were ablaze in large numbers, illuminating the heavens for a mile around.” Westside’s first major manufacturer was Joseph Bell Stove and Range Works, located at what is now White River Plaza.

Joseph McKinley died in 1895 leaving his remaining property, known then as McKinley’s Reserve, to heirs. The Reserve was bounded by Gilbert, Nichols, Jackson, and Celia streets. I suspect, but am not certain, that developers planned McKinley’s Reserve to be Westside’s park, similar to how Galliher’s Reserve became Heekin and Wood’s Park became McCulloch. However in 1892, the Muncie Electric Street Railway Company built Westside Park in the suburb’s south end along the river, obviating the need for a ‘McKinley Park’ a few blocks north.

At the time, Electric Street Railway was building trolley lines across Center Township, connecting Old Muncie to its growing suburbs. The line to Westside was completed in 1893, running east-west down Jackson Street. The line split at Calvert, with one section heading north (some of the track is still there) to University Avenue, then due west to a turnaround a bit southwest of what is now Ball State’s Admin Building. The second line, known as Grasshopper Run, ran on the same West Jackson Street tracks to McKinley Avenue, turned north, then west on Gilbert Street to the McKinley Reserve, with a stop just south of what is now Burris. The line continued to Celia, turned south and ran all the way to Westside Park, where a loop pointed the trolley back north on the Grasshopper Run.

In the 1890s, boosters also developed a teachers college just north of Westside, culminating with Eastern Indiana Normal School in 1898. By 1917, the college had become a state institution and a branch campus of Indiana State. Today, of course, we know this school as Ball State University.

Westside’s growth was exponential during the boom. In the same year the school opened, the Morning News reported that “nearly one hundred tax paying residents of the thriving suburb of Westside across the river, assembled at a mass meeting…for the purpose of taking initiatory steps towards organizing a town corporation.”

In October, Westsiders succeeded and incorporated as the town of Normal City, so named in honor of the nascent college. Residents wanted “paved streets, water works, fire protection, a town marshal, and innumerable other necessities.” Some Normal Citonians also wanted independence and opposed “becoming a part of Muncie.” Normal City’s original town boundaries stretched from Celia to Dicks and Riverside to the White River.

The McKinley Reserve remained a private greenspace through the First World War. Around 1900, the Magic City Gun Club ran a shooting range on the Reserve, just north of West Jackson Street. In June 1902, the Muncie Evening Press noted that, at an upcoming carnival, there “will be the sixth annual amateur tournament of the Trap Shooter’s League of Indiana, which will be held on the ten-acre tract of the Magic City Gun Club on the McKinley Reserve, south of the Country Club grounds.”

The Muncie Country Club, a gas boom era ‘leisure society’ for the well-to-do, met seasonally in the north section of the Reserve. The Club had tennis courts, a clubhouse, and a nine-hole golf course, Muncie’s first. Many years later, a former player reminisced that “it was pretty much a stubble field, but we had greens.” Clubbers closed the facility in 1909 and reopened as the Delaware Country Club east of Muncie a year later. The McKinley Reserve, along with the rest of Normal City, was annexed by Muncie in 1919.

Carl Maitland Kitselman, the rollerskate and steel wire tycoon, and his wife Irene bought a section of the McKinley Reserve in 1926. Two years later, they finished building the stunning Tudor Revival manor house on the property, replete with a sunken maze, guest residence, clubhouse, and gazebo. In 1930, the newly formed St. Mary Roman Catholic parish, pastored by Father Edgar Cyr, purchased several acres of the Reserve’s south end and built the first iteration of Noll Hall. The parish bought most of the Kitselman estate in 1949 and began building the school in the ‘50s. The stunning church was completed in 1965. The parish bought the remnant of the Reserve off Nichols from a Kitselman heir in 1977.

I went to school here in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. The research for this column solved several mysteries that I couldn’t quite figure out as a kid, like why there was a giant sunken hedge maze in the middle of the property. There were some places where ancient maples seemed planted in straight lines, which now I think were probably once tree-lined drives. The northwest playground was a walled garden and the now gone pre-school (Benedict House) was a family clubhouse. The Kitselman’s grand manor served for many years as a convent for the Sisters of Notre Dame.

The McKinley Reserve demonstrates that every corner of our great city has a unique story, often best told through maps. I’ve come to realize, the longer I study them, just how much more there is to discover about the Magic City.

Chris Flook is a board member for the Delaware County Historical Society and is the author of  "Lost Towns of Delaware County, Indiana" and "Native Americans of East-Central Indiana." For more information about the Delaware County Historical Society, visit delawarecountyhistory.org.