The Myth of Middletown, J.P. Hall

The Myth of Middletown, J.P. Hall 

Muncie has long been known as “Middletown.”

Since the 1920s, it has stood as a symbolic city—an archetype of American life.  

Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd selected it to represent the habits, rituals, and everyday rhythms of a typical industrial community.

Their findings became foundational to how the United States came to see itself: middle-class, Protestant, industrious, modest, and modern.

But that myth—like all myths—holds some truths and is also incomplete. It told a powerful story, but a selective one. And what it left out still lingers in the city’s psyche.

We all live inside personal myths, the stories we inherit, absorb, and eventually revise. Cities, too, live by myth. Muncie’s Middletown identity was never just a data set; it was psychological architecture, a symbolic portrait of who we believed ourselves to be. For those of us who live here, it continues to shape how we think about identity, community, and possibility.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of depth psychology, taught that every individual—and every collective—has a shadow: the parts of ourselves we repress, ignore, or refuse to confront. The shadow is not inherently negative. It often contains what we have simply forgotten or left behind. When unacknowledged, it festers. When integrated, it can lead to wholeness. That is the path of individuation: becoming who we truly are.

In recent years, I have come to realize that my own process of individuation is deeply tied to the city around me. I project onto Muncie—and Muncie reflects to me—not just memory but meaning. In Jungian psychology, projection is how we unconsciously encounter our inner world in the outer ones, sometimes distorting, sometimes revealing. I study Muncie’s history, its buildings, its bifurcations, because I am also trying to understand my own. It is a reciprocal process.

Yet the Middletown myth has always had its blind spots. It focused entirely on a white, middle-class core centered near downtown.

It excluded the neighborhoods of Industry, Whitely, and other parts of the city. Even the Lynds acknowledged the existence of “two Muncies”—but chose to study just one.

That omission was not only racial or cultural—it was also economic. Muncie was an industrial town. It was built on the dignity of work and the promise of mobility through manufacturing. General Motors. Ball Corporation. Delco Remy. Warner Gear. These names were not just employers; they were community anchors. Families built their rhythms around shift changes. Neighborhoods grew up near the plants. Churches, corner stores, and ballfields orbited them. It was a way of life.

And then, one by one, they left.

Ball Corporation moved its headquarters to Colorado in the 1990s. GM closed its last plant in 2003, the same year it reported $3 billion in profits. There was no farewell address. No transition plan. Just a lock on the gate. Others followed or faded. What was once a shared certainty becoming a landscape of layoffs, disbelief, and disorientation.

The economic impact was immense. But the deeper wound may have been psychological. Muncie had built its identity around work—dependable, decent, dignified work. When that vanished, it left not only joblessness, but a loss in meaning. The institutions that once held the place together, the factories, the unions, the social fabric around them—were gone. The shadow remained: disinvestment, vacancy, and a generation that never knew the civic pride their grandparents did.

If the original Middletown was defined by industrial purpose, post-industrial Muncie is defined by its absence. That, too, is part of the story we must learn to tell. And the unraveling was not confined to jobs alone. As factories closed and neighborhoods hollowed out, the institutions that once gave structure to civic life began to erode as well. Churches lost members. Clubs folded. Gathering spaces disappeared. The loss was not just economic—it was relational. In the absence of work, we began to lose places where people found meaning together.

Take, for example, the city’s southside YMCA—eventually known as “The Multi.” It was an essential meeting spot for Black youth and families when the main YMCA was segregated. That part of the story is rarely told. In the 1970s, the Y sold the southside facility to the city, promising a new, consolidated downtown location. That new Y was built, but less than a decade later, a second, separate facility was constructed on the city’s northwest side—serving a different population entirely. Meanwhile, the southside site was left behind. The building was eventually demolished. A proposal for a new community center was submitted; however, the facility was not constructed. Today, the site holds affordable housing. The building is gone—but the shadow remains.

Education tells a similar story.

In the postwar period, Muncie built two new high schools: Southside and Northside. On the surface, it was about modernization. But the effect was deepening division. Further Bifurcation. Southside became a racially mixed school—yet adopted “The Rebels” as its mascot, complete with Confederate imagery.

Northside, serving a mostly white suburban population, opened a few years later. In the 1970s, a federal court challenged the district’s attendance boundaries as a form of de facto segregation. That case is rarely remembered today.

Those two high schools are gone, but their shadows remain.

Let me be clear: the shadow can reside in communities, just as it can in individuals and institutions. But that shadow is not all we are. The strength, resilience, and cultural richness within our city have always endured, even when overlooked or undervalued.

What lives in the shadow is not necessarily the city’s failure, but the deeper patterns of our civic culture, our habit of seeing only part of the picture, of telling only part of the story. What unsettles us is not the presence of overlooked places or people, but the truth they reveal—about what we have chosen to remember, and what we have chosen to ignore.

To understand this, we must also consider persona—another Jungian concept. The persona is the mask we present to the world. Every individual has one. So does every city. Muncie’s persona has long been shaped by the Ball family and Ball State University—institutions that brought innovation, investment, and educational opportunity. They also shaped how Muncie saw itself: professional, philanthropic, aspirational. But persona is never the whole story. In fact, the more tightly we cling to it, the more the shadow grows.

The city’s downtown reflects this tension too. In the latter half of the 20th century, large swaths of Muncie’s historic core—including the courthouse square—were bulldozed under the direction of outside experts (most notably Victor Gruen and Associates), and community leaders who thought they knew what was best for all of us. Blocks were cleared not to serve the people who lived here, but to make way for a future imagined elsewhere—one that never fully came to be. What disappeared was not just buildings, it was continuity, context, and civic memory. The loss is rarely acknowledged in the city’s official narrative—but it remains etched in the landscape, and in the psyche of the place.

Race is part of this story—but not all of it. So are class divisions. So is a quiet pride. So is a culture of avoidance: the collective shrug that says, “That’s just the way it is/was.” The Ball Corporation brought economic vitality—but also bulldozed the city’s most prominent public high school and helped reinforce a top-down model of development. Then, like the companies before them, they left. Their legacy is complicated, and Muncie’s persona still carries their imprint.

A persona is necessary, it helps us function, tells a story, gives shape to who we think we are. But it is not the whole.

It is where the deeper work begins. Which brings me to the present.

Across Muncie, people are asking: Who are we? What do we want to become? Can we remember forward?

That phrase—remembering forward—captures the task ahead. It means honoring what we have lost, acknowledging what we have overlooked, and choosing what we carry into the future. It means seeing our full selves—not just the curated image.

Muncie is not finished. Neither am I. This work—of seeing clearly, of integrating what we have ignored—is both personal and collective. It is a lifelong journey for me, and a generational responsibility for all of us.

What we choose to confront today will echo far beyond us.

I believe that healing begins with honesty. With reflection. With care.

And with the courage to face what has been hiding in plain sight all along.

J.P. Hall is a 'Facing Middletown' facilitator & community partner, Director of the Center for Historic Preservation and Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at Ball State University.  Fascinated by history, architecture, depth psychology, and identity, he explores how places, rich in memory, shape belonging. His work focuses on heritage preservation, 'deep place,' and the role of beauty in bridging past, present, and future.

Learn more and follow: In Search of Deep Place | J.P. Hall | Substack

*Editor's note:

'Facing Middletown' is a community compilation documentary and book project exploring life in Muncie, Indiana in 2025 through its identity as Middletown, USA. 

100 years into the Middletown Studies, the Center for Middletown Studies is continuing its longitudinal and sociological research.

As an extension of that research, and centering first-person narratives, CSM is working with The Facing Project, and other community-engaged practitioners and navigators like J.P. Hall, to better understand Muncie, the people who live here, and archive their unvarnished stories about their Muncie lives and places.    

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Contact: Aimee Robertson-West, facingmiddletown@facingproject.com