Carmel, IN news and local guide

When the government put land in the area up for sale in the 1820s, many farmers, most of them Quakers, settled on the west bank of the White River. The town, first called Bethlehem, was platted and recorded in 1837 by Daniel Warren, Alexander Mills, John Phelps and Seth Green, who each donated equal adjoining parcels along the Indianapolis-Peru Road, now Westfield Boulevard. The original plot at Rangeline Road and Main Street is marked by a clock tower given by the Rotary Club in 2002. Because Indiana already had a Bethlehem post office, the post office opened in 1846 as Carmel, after the biblical town in 1 Samuel 25:2, and the town took the name when it was incorporated in 1874.

More about Carmel

The Monon Railroad began serving Carmel in 1883, and electricity and telephone lines arrived in the 1900s. The Wednesday Literary Club and the schoolteacher Mahlon Luther Hains started the first library in 1904, and a Carnegie library opened at 40 East Main Street in 1913. The Carmel Horse Show was held on and off in the first half of the 20th century, and the town's only bank closed in 1930. In 1924 one of the first automatic traffic signals in the United States, invented by Leslie Haines, was installed at Main Street and Rangeline Road, and it is now displayed in the old train station on the Monon Trail. Sources Wikipedia: Carmel, Indiana