Ulen: The vagabond turned CEO and unusual Boone County town: encore

He quit school after the fifth grade to ride the rails, so Henry Ulen was an unlikely Hoosier to become an international business tycoon. Ulen also created and became the namesake of an unusual small town that's surrounded by the city of Lebanon in Boone County. In this encore broadcast of a show from 2022, History Live will take a dual look at Henry Ulen, an industrialist, and the town of Ulen that he founded in the 1920s not far from where he had grown up. "I traveled from the time I was 14 until I was 18," Ulen once said. "The moment the idea hit to go somewhere, and it always did in the spring, I was off. St. Louis, Denver, Chicago, Dodge City, Cincinnati . . . anywhere the next freight train happened to be going." Henry Ulen (1871-1963) founded Ulen & Company, a prestigious business that oversaw infrastructure projects in places like Bolivia, Iran and Greece. The company was based in New York City until Ulen decided to return to Indiana and create a town as a community for his executives and engineers. Although that's no longer the case (Ulen & Company shut down more than 60 years ago), the 40-acre town still has about 120 residents. Just as in the 1920s, the hub of the community is a golf course and country club.