[4] It is the principal city of the Indiana, Pennsylvania micropolitan area, about 46 miles (74 km) northeast of Pittsburgh.

[5] It is a part of the greater Pittsburgh–New Castle–Weirton combined statistical area, as well as the Johnstown and Pittsburgh media markets.

The largest employer in the borough today is Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the second-largest of 14 PASSHE schools in the state.

[7] On at least one occasion, an anti-slavery mob in Indiana rescued a fugitive slave from extradition back to slavery in the South.

[8] The town was also where James Moorhead, a local abolitionist leader, published several anti-slavery newspapers.

Moorhead eventually sold the Clarion and founded a new anti-slavery paper, the Indiana Independent, which he published until his death in 1857.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of 1.8 square miles (4.7 km2), all of it land.

Indiana has a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb), with warm summers and cold, snowy winters.

[22] McCreary was renamed to Specialty Tires of America in 1992, and has its main office in Indiana.

Despite the fact that he left the area upon graduating from high school, the town always followed his career closely, with the local newspaper periodically publishing rumors in his later years that Stewart planned to return there to live.

His first novel, Jonathan Troy (1954), is set entirely in a thinly disguised Indiana, and his novel The Fool's Progress (1988), which he called his "fat masterpiece", is an autobiographical account of his growing up in this area and his imagined attempt to return home after a lifetime spent mostly in the desert Southwest.