Once a Town, Now a Campus: History of Shooters Hill
- Ed Fujawa
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
The Christian Theological Seminary, or CTS, can trace its origins back to the early years of North Western Christian University, the predecessor to today’s Butler University, which was founded in 1855. In 1958, Butler’s School of Religion separated from the university and CTS was formed, although the two institutions maintained close contact. In the early 1960s, CTS sought to establish its campus on land on the south side of Butler’s campus, along the north side of 42nd Street between Haughey Avenue and Michigan Road.
Prior to being the location for CTS, this land was actually its own town called Shooters Hill. The town was incorporated in 1925, and pre-dates Butler University’s move to the neighborhood in 1928. But while a “town” in name, its geographic footprint was limited. Its boundaries were Michigan Road to the west (at the time also known as Northwestern Avenue), the Central Canal on the north, Crown Hill Cemetery (and later 42nd Street) to the south, and Haughey Avenue to the east. The total land was about 37 acres, but the population of the town was only 14 people, reaching a peak population of 19 residents in the 1940s. This is because Shooters Hill was essentially a family compound. The town as it was in 1937 is highlighted in red below. Michigan Road is the roadway on the left, with the present-day Newfields beyond that.
The land was owned by the Holliday family, and the residents were the families of Jaquelin Smith Holliday and his son William Jaquelin Holliday, Ernest Rohr, and Edward Dunlap. Rohr was the superintendent of the Shooters Hill estate. Dunlap’s association with the Hollidays is unclear. The Holliday family—not the family for which Holliday Park was named—was involved with the W.J. Holliday Company, which had its start as a hardware store in Indianapolis in the mid 1850s. The company eventually expanded into automotive parts, later selling components for milling, mining, and other industrial uses. Their letterhead and other documents proclaimed them in the business of "iron, steel & heavy hardware." The patriarch of the family, William Jaquelin Holliday, started the family’s company but died in 1918. His wife, Florence, continued to reside in Shooters Hill, along with other members of the family, and her son, Jaquelin Smith, and grandson, William Jaquelin.
During a presentation to the Marion County Board Commissioners seeking approval for the new town (the location was outside the Indianapolis city limits at the time), the attorney for the group of potential town residents indicated that the town would provide its own sewers, electricity, and water, and that there were no children of school age living in the town. Basically, the town would need no county-provided services. One commissioner asked the attorney why incorporation was necessary. Per the Indianapolis News, the response was that the purposes of incorporation “were the same as that of Woodruff Place and other incorporated towns.” This was not very clarifying but likely had to do with avoiding city taxes—especially since the city limits for Indianapolis were rapidly approaching the Shooters Hill area—and being able to dictate who lived in the town, thanks to its quasi-estate nature. Whether this latter consideration had any race-based reasoning behind it is unclear, although limiting who could live where was another reason behind some incorporated towns.
Shooters Hill had at least 6 residences, along with a few smaller outbuildings, and was located on a wooded bluff overlooking the White River valley and the Central Canal. The 1938 aerial image below is an excerpt from a larger image of the Oldfields Estate (later the Indianapolis Art Museum) shows the town looking east from the intersection of Michigan Road and 42nd Street (bottom right-hand corner). In the top right of the image is the Shortridge High School football field which was previously covered in this post.
One of the homes, called the O’Neal home, was the home of Jaquelin Smith’s daughter, Lucy, who married Perry O’Neal. One of the couple’s children, Alice, became a prominent golfer and golf course designer, and worked with her husband, Peter Dye, to design golf courses all over the country.
While more a family estate than a “town,” Shooters Hill held elections for the public offices of Trustee and Marshal. By the time of the 1950 census, reported in 1951, the population was down to 13. In October 1951, Lowell Nussbaum, the author of the long-running Indianapolis News column “The Things I Hear,” explored the source of the Shooters Hill name. He discovered that it was named after an estate that had been previously owned by the family in Virginia. That name was allegedly drawn from a Shooters Hill in England, south of London. References to a Shooters Hill also appear in various novels written by Charles Dickens.
Within the next few years, the Shooters Hill land, and the homes which were located there, began to be sold. Some of the homes in the town were used by Butler fraternities. Theodore B. Griffith, a president with the L.S. Ayres company, owned land along the eastern end of Shooters Hill, along Haughey Avenue. In 1953, he and his wife donated 1.63 acres to Butler University. When the Christian Theological Seminary separated from Butler, CTS identified the Shooters Hill area as the site of their campus.
In May of 1963, CTS began to take action to end the legal status and name of Shooters Hill as the area now was within the city limits of Indianapolis. However, according to the Indianapolis News, the only way to dissolve the incorporation for the town was via a referendum of eligible voters. As of 1962 four houses still stood in the town/seminary grounds, but two were demolished by 1963, with the remaining two being used for student housing. Thus, there were no residents of Shooters Hill left. Eventually, legal action was taken to formerly dissolve the town, and CTS began to construct new buildings in the mid-1960s.
Today, two of the original homes of Shooters Hill still stand: the Holliday House (now the CTS Counseling Center), the left-hand image above, and the previously referenced O’Neal House (currently Butler’s Hospitality House), standing east of it. The former received an Outstanding rating in the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory conducted by Indiana Landmarks. CTS sold its property to Butler University in 2017, (except for a few acres on the far west side of the campus along Michigan Road) but maintained a lease agreement to allow the seminary to continue operations on the site, while Butler also moved academic programs into the buildings in what is now referred to as the “south campus.” The large amount of open land in the south campus area, as shown below in a recent aerial image, may play a role in future expansions for Butler University.
Sources
Indianapolis News: November 23, 1925, June 28, 1940, December 15, 1949, July 31, 1951, September 30, 1958, May 29, 1963.
Indianapolis Star: October 26, 1951, October 31, 1951, October 1, 1958, May 3, 1959, December 13, 1959, December 31, 1959
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Oldfields Aerial View, 1938, Indiana Historical Society,
Wagner's map of Marion County (1931), Indiana State Library Map Collection, https://cdm16066.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15078coll8/id/1079
Ancestry.com and Find A Grave research on the Holliday family.