FROM TRAIL TO RIVER
2000-2025
Muncie, IN
A Long-Term Partnership in Infrastructure and Place.
What is Muncie without the Industry? (Mid 1980s)
For much of the twentieth century, Muncie, Indiana, was shaped by industry – and so was the White River.
A gas boom in the late 1800s attracted the Ball Brothers family who made Muncie the epicenter of their glass making endeavors. Soon, other industrial companies like Kitselman Wire, Hemingray Glass, Warner Gear Company, General Motors, and Delco-Remy followed, and thousands of workers migrated to Muncie as a place to work hard and live well.
Industrial discharge steadily degraded the White River, and by the early 1900s, the river was officially declared dead – a reality that remained largely obscured by the city’s economic momentum.
By the end of the 20th century, however, that momentum was gone.
-
In 1962, Ball Brothers closed their glass plant.
-
In 1989, a major strike at Borg Warner made doing business in Muncie increasingly expensive.
-
By 1994, Delco-Remy ended battery production operations.
-
In 2002, the employee-owned Indiana Steel and Wire (aka Kitselman Wire) faced financial collapse.
-
And in 2006, the iconic Muncie 4-Speed transmission GM closed its factory line.
A steady decline in manufacturing jobs had begun, and by 2020, just 3,900 workers were employed in Muncie’s factories (compared to 12,000 in 1995).
An Unlikely Answer:
Trails, the River, and a Different Way Forward
In the mid-1980s, a group of people in Muncie had already started anticipating this same question, and by 1987, a master planning committee introduced the concept of a River District through the Central City Plan – reimagining the city from its industrial roots toward a place defined by community connection.
That vision had been catalyzed by the 1984 Master Plan for the Minnetrista Museum & Gardens, which opened in 1988 at a time when downtown Muncie struggled to compete with the Muncie Mall and the McGalliard Road commercial strip. Seen as one of the earliest and most tangible steps toward activating the vision of a River District, Minnetrista’s mission (distinct from the industrial mindset that had dominated the community for decades) centered on nature, art, and local heritage as the essential forces for helping the community thrive and flourish.
One of Minnetrista’s first steps in living out that mission, however, proved controversial: They wanted to create a pedestrian zone from Walnut Street to the museum’s center. This meant eliminating a road along the river to create the short stretch of walking trail, and they wondered if this might serve as a catalyst for more trails along the river.
Extending the trail would require out-thinking a host of constraints – from bridges without walkways to traffic flow and community perceptions. Left to solve them alone, Minnetrista was at a standstill.
Meanwhile, an ad hoc committee of community leaders was formed to strategize and focus on building trails along the river. The Cardinal Greenways and White River Greenways, each building in opposite directions, were facing similar constraints as Minnetrista. All three organizations wanted a substantial trail along the river. None of them could create a solution to make it happen – so they looked to Philip Tevis in his role at the Minnestrista’s Director of Facilities and Planning Management to outline a plan.
The first action: build confidence by converting Minnetrista Boulevard from two-way traffic to one-way flow to make way for more trails and a river overlook.
The second second action: outline a 15-year-plan that would require funding, developing, and building a trail from the Hawthorne Drive on the west side of town way out to the Kistleman Wire Mill.
The catch? Everyone agreed it felt like the right plan, but funding it would require nearly $25M.
“No one can just come up with that money,” says Phil Tevis, owner of FlatLand Resources. “We knew we’d have to fund and develop this in increments, over years.”
The First Breakthrough (Early 2000s)
The first breakthrough in funding came through a Lilly Endowment grant, which was awarding money for improving health in low-income neighborhoods. “We pitched the idea of a trail including road improvements that would connect McCulloch Park, Cardinal Greenway and the Whitley Neighborhood to Minnetrista. It would be a river trail for health benefits” says Phil. “They liked the idea and awarded the money.”
Simultaneously, the two trail groups negotiated the purchase of land for a section of road that would later become the McCulloch trailhead. With funding in place, the work intentionally made sure that the trail efforts with Minnetrista, White River Greenways, and Cardinal Greenways were all focused on the same goal: to ultimately connect all trail users to the Cardinal Greenways, a national trail that welcomes over 500,000 visitors into Muncie every single year.
Combined, the Lilly grant helped leverage a Cardinal Greenway grant which resulted in 10 new miles from the White River to Gaston, Indiana.
Because Phil’s role as a Minnetrista employee included helping the greenways, community leaders encouraged him to consider creating a for-profit business that would make him more available to several not-for-profits that needed project management skills. This is when FlatLand Resources was established.
The timing was right as FlatLand became deeply involved in watershed work at the Soil and Water Conservation District, writing and securing one of the the first IDEM 319 Clean Water Watershed Grants awarded in the state of Indiana.
“It’s the state’s longest continuing watershed project. It opened the door for dozens more projects like it, and we still help manage all of them,” says Phil. “We began as trail builders and water helpers.”
It’s also work that helped clarify a bigger objective for those working to build a trail: “If we wanted to build a successful trail, we knew we couldn’t do that without a healthy river,” says Phil. “This was reinforced by a Montana-based consultant who helped with the White River watershed planning and urged the removal of Muncie’s dams to increase water quality and the biodiversity of the river species. He told us that we couldn’t have a trail without a clean, free-flowing river."​
A multi-year project seemed to be overwhelming. Fortunately, the broad capacity of FlatLand Resources created ease for the Ross Community Center. They prepared our grants, designed and built our fields and park within the funds awarded to us.
- Jacqueline Hanoman. Executive Director
How Do You Build a Trail along a Dead River?
By 1972, the White River had been officially declared dead, declining from 160 species in the late 1800s to just six by about 1900. By the 1970s, besides anglers and four-wheel-drive trucks, few in the community used the river. It was dirty and dangerous, colored with pollution, tainted with blood from an industrial slaughterhouse, and rancid with odor.
Even more, of the 12 dams between the confluence of the Ohio River and the White River, five belonged to Muncie – and stood within a four mile stretch of one another.
The conundrum: Without removing the dams, you couldn’t improve the river’s health. Without community support, you couldn’t remove the dams. And Muncie’s most vocal defender of improving the water quality and protecting the dams was John Craddock, Director of Indiana’s Bureau of Water Quality.
Protect the River by Changing the Process
As a nationally respected figure and longtime defender of the low-head dams along Muncie’s White River, John Craddock viewed the dams as non-negotiable safeguards that held back polluted sediments during low-flow conditions. When asked about the possibility of removing them, Craddock’s famous words were “not in my lifetime.”
With the message received loud and clear, FlatLand didn’t try to push back against Craddock. Instead, they leaned in, built a relationship, and invited Craddock into the process.
“John was considered the godfather of the dam,” says Phil. “He built an incredible legacy of pollution prevention – both here in Muncie and internationally through the United Nations. If we were going to succeed with the trails and cleaning up the river, we wouldn’t be able to do it without him as our advocate.”
Assigned to implement and build John’s vision of a river trail in Muncie, Phil’s first step in changing Craddock’s perceptions on dam removal was to include him in the planning meetings with Montana and Wisconsin stream ecologists (one who had ties to Aldo Leopold as his pupil, bringing credibility to John Craddock’s own expertise). John brought his own written vision to the meeting to discuss building a trail along the river, and he listened to arguments as to why dams should be removed.
After the meetings, John Craddock’s perceptions began to shift – ever so slightly.
He said that he “might” support dam changes, but in the end, he knew the uphill battle would be local politics and local emotions tied to the dams. He couldn't support any dam changes if the elected officials would not support it as well. This could create a feedback loop.
It’s here where a normal project might stall and fail – the largest voice and strongest voice on a subject refusing to budge. But this is the point in nearly all community stories where FlatLand tends to thrive the most – finding ways to build alliances, collaborations, and agreement even in the hardest of scenarios. A few of those ways included:
The Removal of the Three Dams had an Immediate Impact
Where the White River once supported only four to six tolerant species in the early 1970s, fish diversity had already climbed to roughly 80 species by the mid–1990s following the elimination of heavy metal discharge.
With dam removal, the system changed again.
-
Water temperatures stabilized.
-
Oxygen levels improved.
-
Silt-intolerant species redistributed evenly through the river.
Kreel surveys told the story even more plainly: In the 1980s, anglers reported carp as their target. By the late 2010s, their target species had become smallmouth bass – a keystone predator that only survives when the river’s ecosystem is healthy enough to support a complex, healthy food web.
In 2018, federal infrastructure dollars became available for dam removal through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, paired with state programs administered by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and Indiana Department of Environmental Management.
FlatLand identified these opportunities early and navigated the full approval process: historic preservation review, fisheries analysis, IDEM discharge concerns, Army Corps jurisdiction, and local control of levees.
Of the remaining dams, one protected a sewer crossing and has not yet been altered. (Discussions on how to alter this dam remain on-going.) Another dam, owned by the water company, was modified with a riffle instead of removed (funded through $450,000 raised by fisheries advocates committed to restoring the river).
By the end of the process, all but one of Muncie’s dams were either removed or rendered passable.
The day the last of the first three dams was removed, kayakers organized the first ever obstruction free river float in Muncie. Seth Slabaugh covered the entire story, sharing with the community.
Today, paddle sport pickup points scatter along a six-mile span. More have been planned from the reservoir to Yorktown, creating Muncie’s only blueway. Fishing, walking, biking, tubing, and paddling bring people to the river. And those people bring more people.
Even more, a clean river didn’t just solve the initial trail challenges faced by Minnetrista, Cardinal Greenways, and White River Greenways. It allowed their visions to merge and flourish. Each year, the trails welcome more than 250,000 people to hike or ride past the trail at Minnetrista and help to generate more than $25M in local revenue.
FlatLand’s role in watershed protection, river restoration, dam removal, and trail systems doesn’t just start and end in Muncie, Indiana. The same funding logic and regulatory navigation used in Muncie now drives dam removal projects along the Little Miami River in Ohio, where Flatland has served as project manager across multiple communities for almost 10 years. The dams in Ohio are scheduled to be removed in 2027.
No matter where FlatLand is serving, they take the same lessons learned in Muncie into the communities they partner with, proving that it’s possible to rebuild quality of place through long-term, collaborative systems thinking.
