With the emergence of the railroads, hundreds of miles could be traveled in a much shorter time, causing a train passenger to apparently experience several slight changes in time over the course of even a short rail trip. In Indiana, local mean time varied from GMT-5:39 in the east to GMT-5:52 in the west.
Since the sun reaches "high noon" four minutes later for every degree of longitude traveled towards the west, the time in every town was different. Shanks, in which the author identified 345 areas in the state with a different time zone history for each.īefore 1883 in the United States, most towns and cities set their own local time to noon when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. The most extensive study of time zone history in Indiana was published in The American Atlas (1978) by Thomas G. South West, near Evansville: Gibson, Posey, Spencer, Vanderburgh, and Warrick North West, near Chicago: Jasper, Lake, LaPorte, Newton, Porter South West: Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin S: Monroe, Brown, Bartholomew, Lawrence, Jackson, Orange, Washington.W: Montgomery, Fountain, Parke, Vigo, Clay, Sullivan, Greene, Owen, Vermillion, Putnam.NW: Benton, Warren, White, Tippecanoe, Carroll, Clinton.N: Saint Joseph, Marshall, Fulton, Cass, Miami, Howard, Tipton.Columns marked with * contain the data from zone.tab.Įast of the 1961 divide: (all unlisted counties) Indiana is covered by the following zones in the tz database. The diagrams in this article are colored to show these 11 zones and a key is provided below. The tz database lists 11 time zones for Indiana, where each zone is defined as a geographic area that observed the same offsets from UTC since Janu(the UNIX epoch). Tz database Counties grouped by zones as defined in the tz database Since April 2, 2006, all counties in Indiana observe daylight saving time. Southwestern Indiana ( Evansville Metro Area):.Northwestern Indiana ( Chicago- Gary metropolitan area):.Six of these counties are in northwestern Indiana, near Chicago (which observes Central Time), and six are in southwestern Indiana, near Evansville, where the metro area includes portions of southeastern Illinois and western Kentucky, which also observe Central Time. Indiana observes Eastern Time, except for 12 of its 92 counties, which observe Central Time. Time zones Time in Indiana: Counties grouped by time zone. In 2005, the Indiana General Assembly reached a decision to implement daylight saving time state-wide beginning in April 2006. In April 2006, several southwestern and northwestern counties reverted to Central time.Īs much of Indiana is on the western frontier of the Eastern time zone, there was opposition from many in the state to observing daylight saving time there for decades. The official dividing line has generally moved progressively west from its original location on the Indiana– Ohio border, to a position dividing Indiana down the middle, and finally to its current location along much of the Indiana– Illinois border.
state of Indiana is divided into Eastern and Central time zones. Location of the state of Indiana in the United States, highlighted in red.