Master of Arts in Arts Administration student Sara Marshall has achieved something few Master’s students can say they have: published a book.
Marshall’s book, “Creating the Crossroads: 100 Years of Civil Construction in Indiana,” chronicles the last century of construction that has made Indiana the Crossroads of America. O’Neill sat down with Marshall for a Q&A to talk about the book, her favorite stories in it, and how her experience at O’Neill has helped her along the way.
O: Tell me a little bit about the book. What can O’Neill students, alumni, faculty, staff, and supporters expect?
M: Yeah, so this book is called Creating the Crossroads, 100 Years of Civil Construction in Indiana. And though it says 100 years, it’s really from statehood. So that’s, what, 200 some years? I was hired by Indiana Constructors, Inc., which is a trade association for the road builders of Indiana, before I was out of undergrad. They were about to celebrate their centennial, and they wanted me to come in and write a book about the history of road building. And so, I tried very hard to make it accessible to a broader public, because the intended audience they wanted was for their road builders, like the companies who are members of this association, and a lot of them have been in the association since the beginning. But I also wanted it to be accessible for anyone to pick it up, read it, and get something out of it. It talks of personal stories of some people during World War II, some of the road builders were either drafted or voluntarily went to war. And I had a lot of primary sources—so a lot of like actual letters that were sent, board of directors’ minutes, correspondences, a lot of historical documents. It looks at the industry in Indiana, it zooms out to the historical context of what was going on at that time in the world, and then it zooms in to just an interesting person or figure or whatever to take you from statehood to today.
O: Can you share one of your favorite stories from the book? Whether that’s Bloomington or Indianapolis, or anywhere else?
M: Here’s a fun one, this is in Indianapolis. This would have been the 1900s. There was this guy, Carl Fisher, who owned an automobile shop with his brothers. Originally, it was a bike shop, and then the Ford Model T came on the market and he’s like, “oh, yeah, cars.”
And this dude was a character. He was a millionaire because he invented headlamps for cars. He was rich, and he would do publicity stunts like, “I want you to buy this car. I’m going to push it off a third story building and drive it away to show you how durable it is.”
Another thing he did was he attached one of the cars to a hot air balloon, as the basket, and got in the car, then flew from downtown Indy to Beech Grove and landed. But the secret was he took the engine out of the car to make it lighter, so that he could get up into the air at all. He was big into theatrics like that.
This was before he got into road building or like roads themselves. He was one of the founding people of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and it was his idea to lay the bricks, and the reason it’s called the Brickyard. He loved racing and showing how fast he could go.
He realized that all the roads everywhere else were awful. That was the limiting factor in cars going fast. After the speedway, he pushed for the creation of the Lincoln Highway, which was the first transcontinental road from Madison Square Garden in New York City to San Francisco. Back then, the government didn’t really pay for roads, it was mostly private money. He had to sell subscriptions to the highway to get it built. He got President Woodrow Wilson, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Packard Motor Car Company, and a bunch of other names of that time on board. He did not see the completion of the Lincoln Highway because the Great Depression halted construction. Fisher lost his fortune and developed severe alcoholism, which killed him. That work, though, is now U.S. 30 in Indiana, which goes through Fort Wayne, Warsaw, and Valparaiso.
He’s one of my favorite characters of road building, and just how grandiose he was and how he said, “I want to build this road. We’re gonna make it happen.”
O: How has being a MAAA student at O’Neill helped you with the process of writing and publishing a book?
M: I wrote most of the book before I came to O’Neill. I applied in summer of 2020, then chose to defer my enrollment a year. I turned in the book to the publisher, the Indiana Historical Society, in November of 2022, which is when I started school here. However, O’Neill has helped me because it’s given me connections to the Historical Society and the chops to execute what’s really a four-to-five-year-long project. And there’s been a lot of things in like retrospect that I’m learning at the O’Neill School that would have been helpful to know while I was fresh out of my bachelor’s degree.
O: Could you share examples of one of those moments?
M: I think one of the biggest things was taking a leadership seminar with Karen Gahl-Mills. I took that my first semester of grad school when I still had that kind of overlap, I was a part-time employee, and I was transitioning. The leadership skills and styles and all the facets I learned in that class really made me realize I would have structured the project differently from the go if I had those leadership skills and confidence in my abilities.
O: Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you’d want to share about this book or about being an O’Neill student?
M: I’ve really appreciated how supportive everyone has been in the O’Neill School and in the MAAA program with this project, even though most of it did not happen while I was in school. It took a full calendar year for it to be published, and it was nice to work through that and share that success with them before it was public. How enthusiastic people were about it in the process, when I didn’t have much to show for it, so to speak. That was a good feeling.
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