Representative George L. Kinnard

George L. Kinnard (1803 – November 26, 1836) was a Jacksonian representative from Indiana and an early civic and political leader in the developing interior of the state. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1803. After the death of his father, he moved with his widowed mother to Tennessee, where he completed his preparatory studies. Seeking opportunity on the expanding western frontier, he moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1823, only a few years after the city had been designated the state capital. There he studied law, was admitted to the bar, and commenced practice in Marion County, Indiana.

Kinnard quickly became involved in local public affairs. In 1826 and 1827 he served as assessor for Marion County, a position that placed him at the center of the county’s early fiscal and land-record administration. At the same time, he continued to build his legal practice in Indianapolis and the surrounding area. His growing prominence led to election to the Indiana House of Representatives, where he served as a member of the State house from 1827 to 1830. During these years he participated in the legislative work of a state still in the process of organizing its counties, transportation routes, and local governments.

In addition to his legislative service, Kinnard developed a parallel career in surveying and land development. From 1831 to 1835 he served as county surveyor of Marion County, a role that gave him significant influence over the laying out of roads, town sites, and property boundaries in central Indiana. Even earlier, in 1829, he had been hired by William Miller to lay out the town of Eagle Village, demonstrating his technical skill and growing reputation as a surveyor. While serving in the Indiana General Assembly, he was present when legislation was passed on January 29, 1830, providing for the organization of Boone County, Indiana, to take effect on April 1, 1830. Recognizing the opportunities that would accompany the creation of a new county seat, Kinnard and his business partner, James Perry Drake, examined surveys and land records and discovered that three parcels of land remained available near the geographical center of the new county.

On March 1, 1830, Kinnard and Drake entered these three tracts at the federal land office in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and they received their patents, or deeds, from the United States Government on February 8, 1831. It is assumed that they paid $1.25 an acre, the usual federal price for public land at that time. One tract contained 62.32 acres and lay between what are now Fordice and South Streets, extending east from the meridian line to Park Street. A second tract of eighty acres lay immediately west of the meridian line, bounded on the south by South Street and on the north by Royal and Fordice Streets. Just southwest of this acreage was another eighty-acre tract running from South Street to Noble Street and extending almost to Patterson Street on the west. With this land acquired, Kinnard and Drake set to work platting a town on a portion of their holdings, an area that became the “Original Plat” of Lebanon, Indiana. The plat was roughly bounded on the north by Royal and Fordice Streets, on the east by Park Street, on the south by South Street, and on the west by Clark Street, and consisted of twelve outlots, nineteen blocks exclusive of the public square, and five partial blocks. Each of the nineteen blocks was divided into eight lots of approximately 60 by 120 feet, and the Original Plat extended from a line about thirty feet south of South Street north to Williams Street, and from a line midway between East and Park Streets west to Clark Street.

Kinnard’s surveying responsibilities also extended to regional transportation routes. As Marion County’s surveyor, he surveyed a highway through the wilderness northwest from Indianapolis toward Lafayette, a route that would become the Indianapolis and Lafayette Road. Despite later assertions that the road had been surveyed and located in 1829, evidence indicates that the actual surveying was not completed until sometime in 1831, after Kinnard and Drake had already mapped out the town site they hoped would become the Boone County seat. When Kinnard brought the surveyed road to the town plat he and Drake had laid out, he ensured that travelers would pass directly through the new community by jogging the road west down Main Street for about eight blocks before angling it out along what became Lafayette Avenue and then on toward Lafayette. This deliberate alignment was intended to secure Lebanon’s prominence as a stop along a major overland route, although later construction of Interstate 65 would bypass his carefully planned “dream city.”

Alongside his civil and political activities, Kinnard held a military role as a colonel in the Indiana state militia, reflecting the common practice of early nineteenth-century civic leaders holding militia commissions in frontier communities. His combined experience in law, surveying, local office, and the militia provided a foundation for his entry into national politics. Identified with the Jacksonian movement that supported President Andrew Jackson, Kinnard was elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Congresses. He took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on March 4, 1833, representing Indiana at a time when the state was rapidly growing in population and political influence. In Congress he served during a period marked by debates over federal internal improvements, banking policy, and the expansion of settlement in the West, issues that closely aligned with his background in land development and infrastructure.

Kinnard’s congressional service continued without interruption until his untimely death in 1836. He was aboard the steamship Flora when two pipes connecting the boilers separated, causing an explosion aboard the vessel. He sustained severe injuries in the accident, from which he never recovered, and he died on November 26, 1836, while still in office as a member of the Twenty-fourth Congress. His death placed him among the early members of the United States Congress who died in office during the nineteenth century. He was interred, probably, in the Presbyterian Burying Ground in Cincinnati, Ohio, a cemetery that is now part of Washington Park, reflecting the common practice of the era in which many Hoosier public figures were buried in regional urban centers along the Ohio River.