Addendum to The Grand Social Experiment

Rick Van Kooten

 

What is the best estimate of the location of the fictional Rosewater, Indiana?

Being a Hoosier and someone who loves maps, and who has an obsession akin to trying to explain the periodicity of Rumfoord’s appearances in Sirens of Titan, I could not resist trying to estimate from clues in the novel the location of the fictional town and county of Rosewater.

It was written on a wall, Mr. Ulm, of the men’s room of a beer joint on the border between Rosewater and Brown Counties in Indiana, the Log Cabin Inn. (89)

✑ Rosewater county borders Brown County in Indiana; however, I have not been able to find any “Log Cabin Inn,” but the novel does state that it burned down in 1934.

When the bus stopped in Nashville, Indiana, the seat of Brown County, Eliot glanced up again, studied the fire apparatus on view there. (251)

✑ Driving from the town of Rosewater to Indianapolis, Eliot passed through Nashville in Brown County. Eliot also correctly identifies Nashville as an “arts and crafts center.” Hence Rosewater county must be somewhere south of Brown County.

If I were to somehow wind up in New York, and start living the highest of all possible lives again, you know what would happen to me? The minute I got near any navigable body of water, a bolt of lightning would knock me into the water, a whale would swallow me up, and the whale would swim down to the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, up the Ohio, up the Wabash, up the White, up Lost River, up Rosewater Creek. And that whale would jump from the creek into the Rosewater Inter-State Ship Canal, and it would swim down the canal to this city, and spit me out in the Parthenon [in Rosewater]. (212)

✑ Officially, the Lost River begins in Washington County, just south of Jackson county. The northern border between Washington and Jackson county is the East Fork of the White River (connecting, as described, to the Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi, etc.). The Lost River is an underground river and so could potentially also be in Jackson County.

Rosewater County, the canvas Eliot proposed to paint with love and understanding, was a rectangle.

Bisecting the county exactly, and stopping at its borders, was a stagnant canal fourteen miles long. It was the one dash of reality added by Eliot’s great-grandfather to a stock and bond fantasy of a canal that would join Chicago, Indianapolis, Rosewater and the Ohio.

The town of Rosewater was in the dead center of the county. (45)

✑ Rosewater County must be roughly Jackson County—to best satisfy the above—with an educated guess that the town of Rosewater is very close to Brownstown, Indiana. It also gives the north-south dimension of Rosewater County (shown here) in relation to Jackson County, with a Google map pin drop estimating the location of the town of Rosewater.

I’ve also included Seymour, Indiana in Rosewater County, the hometown of of rocker John Mellencamp, now a Bloomington resident. Images of Rosewater may be exemplified in Mellencamp’s “Small Town” video or the admittedly cheesy 1980s video for “Pink Houses” (“. . . for you and me . . .”). This places the fictional town about an hour’s drive from Bloomington, the home of Indiana University (and Salo University). As a side note, cycling in the northwest corner of Rosewater County includes the spectacular Charles Deam Wilderness. And, no, Bloomington is not like the squalid description of Rosewater: it really is an oasis of beauty and culture in Indiana.

Find Rick Van Kooten’s post on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater here.