Muncie ( MUN-see) is an incorporated city and the chair of Delaware County, Indiana. Previously known as Buckongahelas Town, named after the legendary Delaware Chief. It is located in East Central Indiana, about 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Indianapolis. The United States Census for 2020 reported the city’s population was 65,194. It is the principal city of the Muncie metropolitan statistical area, which has a population of 117,671.

The Lenape (Delaware) people, led by Buckongahelas arrived in the area in the 1790s, founding several villages, including one known as Munsee Town, along the White River. The trading post, renamed Muncietown, was fixed as the Delaware County chair and platted in 1827. Its state was officially abbreviated to Muncie in 1845 and incorporated as a city in 1865. Muncie developed as a manufacturing and industrial center, especially after the Indiana gas boom of the 1880s. It is house to Ball State University. As a repercussion of the Middletown studies, sociological research that was first conducted in the 1920s, Muncie is said to be one of the most studied United States cities of its size.

The area was first approved in the 1790s by the Lenape (Delaware) people, who were irritated west from their tribal lands in the Mid-Atlantic region (all of New Jersey, southeastern New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and northern Delaware) to additional lands in present-day Ohio and eastern Indiana. The Lenape founded several towns along the White River, including Munsee Town, near the site of present-day Muncie.

Contrary to popular legend, the city’s beforehand name of Munsee Town is derived from the “Munsee” clan of Lenape people, the white settlers’ name for a bureau of Native Americans whose village was with situated along the White River. There is no evidence that a mythological Chief Munsee ever existed. (“Munsee” means a devotee of or one of their languages.^{[citation needed]})