“We just have to keep this in mind,” McLain said. That routine changes every April because Illinois goes on daylight time while this section of Indiana does not, leaving Illinois and this section of Indiana with the same time–for seven months. to get to 8:30 church in Danville, Ill., which is in the Central time zone. Marge McLain, the postmaster on the Indiana side of the border, works about 50 steps away from Illinois, and she knows that she and her husband should leave home at 9 a.m. This Balkanized time scheme is magnified in State Line City, a weathered collection of wooden houses, trailers and propane tanks that straddles the Indiana-Illinois border. And two counties near Cincinnati and three near Louisville are in the Eastern zone and adopt daylight time. Ten counties–five near Chicago and five near Evansville–are in the Central zone and adopt daylight time. They operate on Eastern time and don’t go on daylight time.

The overwhelming majority of counties–77–embrace the old saying “Indiana doesn’t change” when it comes to setting the clock. But the time map of vertical Indiana resembles a slab of cheese, nibbled at the corners by mice. Newfoundland, the easternmost province of Canada, exhibits its distinctiveness by setting its time not one hour ahead of Nova Scotia, but 30 minutes ahead.Ĭloser to home, the horizontal states of Tennessee and Kentucky are cleaved down the middle by time-zone boundaries. China, with a land mass larger than the U.S., operates on one time zone. In the worldwide realm of time, Indiana is not unique. “People here think we’re the ones who got it right while everyone else is wrong,” Blomquist said. “Part of the state’s identity is `Hoosier exceptionalism.’ If everyone else is doing something and it looks stupid to you, you shouldn’t do it even though everyone else does it,” Bill Blomquist, a political scientist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said in summarizing the state’s antipathy to fooling around with clocks. In fact, Indiana offers its own version of the Twilight Zone, and the fight over time reflects much of what makes Indiana different from its Midwestern brethren. To those who travel across the state’s vast expanse of corn and soybean fields, Indiana may seem like a monotonous breezeway connecting the monotony of Illinois and Ohio. Supporters want the measure approved in time for Indiana to join the rest of the nation when clocks are moved up an hour April 3. Gerald Torr, a Republican and co-sponsor of the bill to put Indiana on daylight time.

Layered on top of this is genuine anxiety among lawmakers that angry residents, split on the issue, will exact retribution with their votes.

Indiana time zone map 2021