The source of the term “hoosier” for Indiana residents is often said to be Samuel Hoosier, a contractor for the Ohio Falls Canal in Louisville, Ohio, in 1825.
Hoosier’s employees, recruited from Indiana, were known as the “Hoosier men” or simply “Hoosiers.”
By 1833, the term was being used in local periodicals, for example, in a poem in the Indianapolis Journal called “The Hoosier Nest.”