Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Matthews, IN

Matthews is a town in Jefferson Township, Grant County, in east-central Indiana, sitting along the Mississinewa River.

Matthews was founded in 1895, at the height of the Indiana natural gas boom, and was named in honor of Claude Matthews, the governor of Indiana at the time.

The founders placed Matthews near the center of the Trenton Gas Field and hoped its central location might one day make it the capital of Indiana — a plan abandoned by 1903 as the gas field was depleted.

During the boom, Matthews earned the nickname "The Wonder City," as thousands of workers crowded into tent cities to staff its glass, brick and steel plants.

Matthews still has a main street, Massachusetts Avenue, that is unusually wide for a town of its size — a leftover of its boomtown ambitions.

Matthews grew up beside, and eventually absorbed, the older village of New Cumberland, which had been laid out in 1833 and is now remembered as the town's "old town."

The Cumberland Covered Bridge, a wooden Howe truss bridge built in 1877, still spans the Mississinewa River at Matthews and is the only remaining covered bridge in Grant County.

In the Great Flood of 1913, the covered bridge was torn loose and swept three-quarters of a mile downstream, yet it survived nearly intact and was hauled back onto its foundations.

The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and it is the centerpiece of the Cumberland Covered Bridge Festival that the Matthews Lions Club holds each September.

The 2020 census counted 494 people in Matthews, down from 596 in 2010, when the town's residents lived in 234 households.