Darrel Bigham

For nearly 40 years, Bigham was a Professor of History at the University of Southern Indiana, joining as a faculty member in 1970 when the then ISUE had only recently moved to its current campus. In addition to teaching well over 10,000 students at USI, he was the founding director of Historic Southern Indiana, a USI outreach organization dedicated to promoting the region’s historical resources and sites such as New Harmony, the state’s first capitol at Corydon, and Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home.

Upon moving to Evansville as a 27-year-old recent doctoral graduate, Bigham quickly developed a passionate expertise in local and regional history, at the time a relatively unexamined topic. Among his six books, two focused on African American history: We Ask Only A Fair Trial: A History of the Black Community of Evansville, Indiana (1987) and On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (2005). He also published numerous books and articles on Evansville, including An Evansville Album (1988). Reviewers praised his books, both academic and general interest, as simultaneously accessible and rigorously researched.

Bigham’s civic leadership was local and national in scope. In 2000, he was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the 15-member Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, created by Congress to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the 16th president’s birth in 2009. He also served in leadership positions at the Evansville Museum, the Vanderburgh County Historical Society, the Indiana Council for History Education, the Indiana Association of Historians, the Rotary Club of Evansville, the Evansville Arts and Education Council, the Metropolitan Evansville Progress Committee, and Leadership Evansville, of which he was the founding executive director. He chaired the committee that helped Evansville celebrate the Bicentennial from 1974-1977 and helped organize the city’s 175th anniversary celebration in 1987.

A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Bigham was educated in that city’s public schools, graduated magna cum laude in 1964 from Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School in 1964-65. Raised in the Brethren in Christ church by his parents, the late Paul D. and Ethel B. Bigham, he volunteered at an Episcopal parish in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1965, and there met fellow volunteer Mary Elizabeth (“Polly”) Hitchcock of New York City, whom he married in September of that year. He completed his PhD in 1970 at the University of Kansas.

Bigham is survived by his wife of 54 years, Polly Bigham, his son and daughter-in-law, Dr. Matthew H. Bigham and Elizabeth Belle Bigham of St. Louis, his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth Bigham Hotson and David Hotson of New York City, and grandsons Ethan H. Hotson, Russell H. Bigham, John Darrel (“Jack”) Hotson, Samuel H. Bigham, and Peter B. Bigham, as well as by his siblings Larry Bigham of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Marilyn Miller of Harrisburg.

In light of Covid-19, a memorial service will be held at a later date. The family requests that memorial donations be made to Evansville’s local public radio and TV station WNIN.