Map - Warren County, Indiana (Warren County)

Warren County is a county in the U.S. state of Indiana. It lies in the western part of the state between the Illinois state line and the Wabash River. According to the 2010 census, it had a population of 8,440. Its county seat is Williamsport.

Before the arrival of non-indigenous settlers in the early 19th century, the area was inhabited by several Native American tribes. The county was officially established in 1827 and was the 55th county to be formed in Indiana.

It is one of the most rural counties in the state, with the third-smallest population and the lowest population density at about 23 inhabitants per square mile (8.9/km2). The county has four incorporated towns with a total population of about 3,100, as well as many small unincorporated communities. The county is divided into 12 townships which provide local services.

Much of the land in the county is given over to agriculture, especially on the open prairie in the northern and western parts; the county's farmland is among the most productive in the state. Nearer the river along the southeastern border, the land has many hills, valleys, and tributary streams and is more heavily wooded. Agriculture, manufacturing, government, education, and health care each provide substantial portions of the jobs in the county. Four Indiana state roads cross the county, as do two U.S. Routes and one major railroad line.

In the centuries before the arrival of European settlers, the area that became Warren County was on the boundary between the Miami and Kickapoo tribes. By the late 18th century, many Miami had moved further south; most of Indiana north of the Wabash was then occupied by the Potawatomi people. The first non-indigenous settler in the area was probably Zachariah Cicott, a French-Canadian who first traded with the Kickapoo and Potawatomi people around 1802. When General William Henry Harrison took an army from Vincennes to the Battle of Tippecanoe in late 1811, Cicott served as a scout; the trail taken by Harrison's army passed through the area that later became Warren County on its way to and from the battle site in Tippecanoe County. Following the War of 1812, Cicott resumed his trading on the Wabash; the state of Indiana was established in 1816, and Cicott built a log house in 1817 at the location where he later founded the town of Independence. Other settlers came to the area, but probably not until around 1822.

The county was established on March 1, 1827, by the Indiana General Assembly. It was named for Dr. Joseph Warren, who was killed in 1775 at the Battle of Bunker Hill, in which he fought as a private because his commission as a general had not yet taken effect. The short-lived town of Warrenton was the original Warren County seat, chosen by commissioners in March 1828; the next year an act was passed calling for the seat to be relocated, and in June 1829 it was moved to Williamsport.

The first county courthouse was a log house in Warrenton that belonged to (and was occupied by) Enoch Farmer, one of the county's earliest settlers. When the county seat moved to Williamsport, a log house belonging to the town's founder, William Harrison, served this purpose for several years. The first purpose-built courthouse was completed in 1835 at a cost of $2,000; in 1872, it was replaced with a new building that cost $48,000. The third courthouse was built in 1886, in a new section of town that grew around the newly constructed railroad. That building burned in 1907, and the fourth and current Warren County courthouse was completed on the same site in 1908 at a cost of $115,000.

As the 19th century progressed, the United States government's Indian removal policy pushed Native American tribes west of the Mississippi River. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was signed into law, and though that act did not directly address the Potawatomi people of Indiana, it led to several additional treaties that resulted in their removal. In what came to be known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death, about 860 Potawatomi Indians who had refused to leave were forced to move from Indiana to Kansas. On September 14, 1838, the group camped near Williamsport, and on September 15 they camped in the southwestern part of the county before moving into Illinois. Before reaching their destination in Kansas, over 40 of them had died, many of them children; two children died and were buried at the second Warren County campsite.

When the county was established, the Wabash River was vital to transportation and shipping. Zachariah Cicott traded up and down the river, and cities like Attica, Perrysville, Baltimore and Williamsport were founded near the river's banks and flourished because of it. In the 1840s, the Wabash and Erie Canal began to operate and provided even broader shipping opportunities, but the canal favored towns which were on the "right side" of the river; the canal was on the Fountain County side, and towns like Baltimore dwindled as a result. Some towns, such as Williamsport and Perrysville, managed to participate in canal traffic through the use of side-cuts that brought traffic from the canal across the river. When railroads were constructed starting in the 1850s, they in turn began to render the canals obsolete and allowed trade to reach towns that lacked water connections. The canal continued to be used through the early 1870s.

The first trains to run in Warren County operated on portions of the Toledo, Wabash and Western Railway (later the Wabash Railroad) in 1856. The railroad entered the county near Williamsport and was built westward, reaching the western border at State Line City by 1857. West Lebanon was the only other settlement near the railroad's path, but the line bypassed it by about a mile; the town subsequently moved northward to be nearer the station. In 1869 the Indianapolis, Bloomington and Western Railway was built across Mound Township in the southern part of the county. A few years later, in 1872, a branch of the Chicago, Danville and Vincennes Railroad (known as the "Pumpkin Vine Railroad") was built from Bismarck, Illinois, southeast through Warren County; it was built specifically to carry coal from the mines south of Covington. A labor riot at the mines in the late 1870s interrupted the flow of coal, and this combined with the poor financial state of the railroad led to the removal of most of the track by 1880; the remaining portion was removed a few years later. At about this time, in the early 1880s, the Chicago and Indiana Coal Railroad began operating a north–south line through the county. It became part of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad but was abandoned in 1920 due to financial difficulties; a new company operated the line as the Chicago, Attica and Southern Railroad starting in 1921, but financial problems affected the new company as well and the rails were removed in 1946. Another line, part of the New York Central Railroad, was built through the area in 1903; locally, it ran northeast from Danville into Warren County, then turned north through the small towns of Sloan and Stewart and continued north into Benton County. In the 1970s it became part of Penn Central, then Conrail; operations on the line ceased in the 1990s and the tracks were removed, though a portion running north from Stewart remained and became the Bee Line Railroad which serves the grain processing facility in Stewart.