Minnetrista Museum & Gardens

 Minnetrista Museum & Gardens was founded in 1988. Built on the legacy of the Ball family and company, Minnetrista is a 40-acre museum and garden site located on the White River in Muncie, Indiana. The organization presents exhibits, nature trails, educational programs, and community events.

Minnetrista’s 40-acre campus is located upon a bluff along the northern edge of the White River. Today, the site is home to modern museum facilities, five Gilded Age homes, the Minnetrista Boulevard Historic District (added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012), and over 20 acres of cultivated greenspace, including horticultural and ornamental gardens. From the mid-1890s until the 1980s, Minnetrista was home to the extended Ball family, inventors of the Ball Mason jar.

According to Ball family legend, members of the family suggested the name “Minnetrista” for the property. The word combines the Sioux (Dakota) word “mna” (pronounced “mini”), which means water, with the English word “tryst,” which means a “gathering place.

Originally, the name Minnetrista was connected to one of the Ball family homes but today the entire site is very strongly associated with the word. Tied as it is to the Ball family history, the term “Minnetrista” does muddy this site’s actual indigenous history, which is not directly connected to the Sioux. Today, Minnetrista Museum & Gardens strives to make this “gathering place by the water” an inclusive community resource for all the people of East Central Indiana and beyond.

On the northern bank of the White River, the site that is today Minnetrista existed on the outskirts of Muncie, Indiana throughout the nineteenth century. The city of Muncie was incorporated in 1865 to the south of the White River, developed out of the settlement of Munseetown founded just four decades earlier. That original settlement was built upon land opened to white settlers by the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary, which striped Midwestern indigenous communities of their ancestral lands and forced their movement west of the Mississippi.

Prior to this, this part of East Central Indiana had long been home to the Potowatomi and the Miami. In the eighteenth century, part of the Minnetrista site itself was also home to a settlement of the Delaware Nation, who had been systematically driven farther west over many decades because of the advancement of white settlers. The Delaware too were forced to relocate in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, their communities resettling in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Canada.

In the mid-1880s, the Ball family made the decision to move their commercial glass business, Ball Brothers Manufacturing Company, to Muncie. A local natural gas boom in East Central Indiana was then attracting a great deal of industrial business to the region, and the area’s social character appealed to the family. In describing his first visit to Muncie in 1886, Frank C. Ball wrote in his memoirs, “There was nothing about the town that particularly appealed to me, but the men were all courteous, kind, and businesslike.” By the early 1900s, the Ball brothers had expanded their glass business in Muncie into a large, well-respected operation that was producing canning jars and related items in mass for the global market. Between 1893 and 1907, the five Ball brothers each married and built their family homes side by side along the stretch of land they purchased on the north side of the White River. All but one of those homes still stands today. The Frank C. Ball family home, historically known as Minnetrista before the name was applied to the entire property, burned down in 1967. Today, Minnetrista Museum & Gardens oversees the care of three of those houses: Oakhurst, the Lucius L. Ball House, and the Mary Lincoln Cottage.

Here is a local Business that supports the community 

 

Google Map- 

 

3711 N Everbrook Ln, Muncie, IN 47304

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