Crawfordsville is a city in Montgomery County in west central Indiana, United States, west by northwest of Indianapolis. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 16,306. The city is the county seat of Montgomery County, the only chartered city and largest populated place in the county. Crawfordsville is part of a broader Indianapolis combined statistical area, although the Lafayette metropolitan statistical area is only north. It is home to Wabash College, which was ranked by Forbes as #12 in the United States for undergraduate studies in 2008. The city was founded in 1823 on the bank of Sugar Creek, a southern tributary of the Wabash River and named for U.S. Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. History Early 19th century In 1813, Williamson Dunn, Henry Ristine, and Major Ambrose Whitlock, U.S. Army, noted that the site of present-day Crawfordsville was ideal for settlement, surrounded by deciduous forest and potentially arable land, with water provided by a nearby creek, later named Sugar Creek, that was a southern tributary of the Wabash River. They returned a decade later to find at least one cabin had been built in the area. In 1821, William and Jennie Offield had built a cabin on a little creek, later to be known as Offield Creek, southwest of the future site of Crawfordsville. Whitlock, a Virginian who had served under Gen. "Mad" Anthony Wayne in the Northwest Indian War, laid out the town in March 1823. Crawfordsville was named in honor of William H. Crawford, a fellow Virginian who was Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Madison and Monroe at that time and who had issued Whitlock's commission as Receiver of Public Lands. Whitlock was the first settler in the town. According to a diary of Sanford C. Cox, who in 1824 was one of the first schoolmasters in the area, "Crawfordsville is the only town between Terre Haute and Fort Wayne... Maj. Ristine keeps tavern in a two-story log house and Jonathan Powers has a little grocery. There are two stores, Smith's near the land office, and Issac C. Elston's, near the tavern... David Vance [is the] sheriff." It was successfully incorporated as a town in 1834, following a failed attempt three years earlier. In November 1832, Wabash College was founded in Crawfordsville as "The Wabash Teachers Seminary and Manual Labor College". It was created by Presbyterian missionaries but later became non-sectarian. On