Centennial business Monroe Bank: After 110 years, bank is the market leader.

• Author: Beck, Bill
• Position: Banking - Brief Article

When Monroe Bank opened its doors in the fall of 1892, its hometown of Bloomington was still a whistle-stop in the limestone hills of Southern Indiana. Indiana University was still seven years away from being admitted to what would become the Big Ten athletic conference. The biggest businesses in surrounding Monroe County were the limestone quarries that provided much of the stone that graced skyscrapers and monuments from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.

The bank's first president was Hiram E. Wells of French Lick, and most of the bank's other officers were Bloomington residents. Wells and his staff opened an office in the Rohrer Block on East Sixth Street and then moved in mid-1893 to the northeast corner of Kirkwood and Walnut, where it would be located for almost the next 70 years. The bank would participate in Bloomington's business and community life through good times and bad from the Kirkwood and Walnut location.

On Labor Day in 1961, the then Monroe County State Bank moved its main office to the present location at 210 East Kirkwood Ave. Fueled by postwar baby boom enrollment gains at Indiana University, Bloomington grew quickly during the 1960s and 1970s, and the bank grew along with it. The bank opened its first neighborhood branch in Highland Village on the city's west side in 1966, and a second branch in the College Mall opened in the summer of 1974.

In 1983, 91 years after it opened, Monroe County State Bank changed its name to Monroe County Bank, mainly in response to popular usage and to avoid redundancies. Late in 1983, Monroe County Bank held an open house to introduce customers to its expanded customer service, trust, loans and data processing departments.

Growth continued throughout the 1980s. In 1984, the bank installed its first automated teller machines. By that time, the shareholders and directors had formed a one-bank holding company, Monroe Bancorp.

The bank's third branch opened in Walnut Park on Bloomington's south side in the spring of 1985. Two years later, Monroe County Bank purchased three new branch locations in nearby Jackson County from the Citizen's State Bank of Brownstown. With demand increasing for additional work space, the bank relocated its Loan Division to new quarters at 111 S. Lincoln Street in Bloomington in 1989.

Monroe County Bank marked its 99th year of business in 1991 by opening a full-service branch in Ellettsville. In 1998, it replaced its College Mall Branch with the Mall Road Banking...