Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Corydon, IN

Corydon was platted in 1808 by surveyor Harvey Heth and became the county seat of Harrison County the same year; tradition says territorial governor William Henry Harrison asked settler Edward Smith's daughter Jenny to name the town, and she picked "Corydon" from Harrison's favorite hymn, "The Pastoral Elegy," about a shepherd named Corydon.

Corydon became the second capital of the Indiana Territory on May 1, 1813, when the capital was moved east from Vincennes.

Corydon hosted Indiana's first constitutional convention from June 10 to 29, 1816, when 43 delegates drafted the state's first constitution in just nineteen days.

Because the unfinished log courthouse was cramped and hot, the 1816 delegates often worked outside under a giant elm — the Constitution Elm — whose trunk, preserved after the tree died of Dutch elm disease in 1925, still stands in a sandstone memorial built by the WPA.

Under the 1816 constitution, Corydon served as Indiana's first state capital until the government moved to Indianapolis on January 10, 1825; the 1816 limestone courthouse, known as the Old Capitol, is now preserved as the Corydon Capitol State Historic Site.

On July 9, 1863, Corydon was the site of the only official pitched battle fought in Indiana during the Civil War, when about 450 hastily assembled home guards tried to slow Confederate general John Hunt Morgan's 2,000-plus cavalrymen during Morgan's Raid before the town surrendered and was sacked.

The Harrison County Fair in Corydon was first held in 1860 and has run every year since, making it the longest consecutive-running annual county fair in Indiana.

Corydon had 3,153 residents at the 2020 census, living in 1,339 households.

Corydon's downtown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Corydon Historic District, and it includes the Leora Brown School, the oldest standing African-American school in Indiana.

In 1814, Quakers Paul and Susannah Mitchem moved to Harrison County from North Carolina and freed the 107 enslaved people they brought with them, who formed one of the largest communities of free Black residents in early Indiana around Corydon.