Route Descriptions: Indiana

 Route descriptions courtesy of Mark Hansen

Champaign to Crawfordsville, Indiana: The last town in Illinois, Danville, lies along the Vincennes Trail (or Vincennes Trace), which extended from Vincennes, Indiana, on the Wabash River 100 miles south, to Chicago, 160 miles north. It was an ancient Native thoroughfare developed into a commercial byway by Europeans and Americans, used for trading furs, driving livestock, and transporting trade goods. All but the northern-most counties in Illinois are underlain by deposits of coal. The state has been a top-five producer of coal since the 19th century. Vermilion Co, of which Danville is the seat, had large mining operations, both surface (strip) mines and underground mines (which can be recognized by their piles of tailings). As of 2014, it was one of 11 Illinois counties with active mining. The route crosses a mining area just west of Danville. Danville was a station on the Wabash Railroad’s route between Detroit and St Louis plied by the “Wabash Cannonball.” The railroad’s marketers took the name from the 19th century folk song recorded by Roy Acuff in 1936, which is one of fewer than 40 singles to have sold 10 million copies. (The lyrics mention many places in the United States, including St Louis, but not Detroit.) Danville is the birthplace and boyhood home of the comedian Dick Van Dyke, who turns 99 this year (and his brother Jerry). 

In my business, Danville’s most important native son was Joseph G. Cannon, a 23-term Republican congressman and Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911 during the period of “Czar Rule” in the House. In 1910, Cannon’s iron-fisted control in the House prompted a revolt by progressive Republicans that returned power to the membership. Cannon appeared on the cover of the first issue of Time magazine when he retired in 1923, the longest serving member of Congress to that time. 

Entering Indiana, the route travels briefly into Vermillion Co and Warren Co before crossing the Wabash River into Fountain Co and its seat, Covington. Vermillion Co was the birthplace and boyhood home of the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories about the experiences of ordinary “dogface” soldiers for the Scripps-Howard chain during World War II. (He died in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.) The Wabash River is a tributary of the Ohio. Most of the state of Indiana is in its watershed. 

In 1811, 50 miles upstream from Covington, near today’s Lafayette, an American force led by territorial governor William Henry Harrison defeated warriors of the Shawnee nation led by Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe, a feat that helped propel Harrison into the presidency in 1840. (He delivered a two-hour inaugural address – the longest in history – standing hatless and coatless in wet, chilly weather, and died 31 days later, the shortest presidency in history.) 

Covington was the home of Lew Wallace in his younger adulthood. He was a Union Army general, a member of the military commission that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators, and the author of the historical adventure story Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), the top-selling American novel until Gone with the Wind. He wrote most of the novel in Crawfordsville, where he moved a few years before the Civil War. He completed it while serving as the territorial governor of New Mexico, living in the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe. 

In Crawfordsville, today’s destination, you can tour Wallace’s Study, which he built in the 1890s, and a museum devoted to his life and career. Crawfordsville is also the home of Wabash College, a private liberal arts college that is one of only three non-ecclesiastical men’s colleges in the United States. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Residence and Jail has a rare example of a “rotary” jail, now open as a museum. (It is a block north of the left turn onto Washington St.) The two-story block of 16 pie-slice-shaped cells rotates on a motorized shaft, which enabled the jailers to supervise the inmates from outside the enclosure. It dates to 1882. In 1887, a man convicted of a double slaying was executed in a yard outside the jail in front of 200 ticketed witnesses (despite the state’s longstanding ban on public executions). The rope broke twice but the hangman succeeded on the third try. The unfortunate man’s ghost is said to haunt the jail. 

Crawfordsville is host to a Nucor steel mill that is the world’s first thin-slab casting minimill, making sheet steel from scrap in an electric-arc furnace and a continuous caster. (In 1991, the New Yorker published a two-part story about it.) One local boy made good is Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993. He grew up on a horse farm near Crawfordsville and attended college at Indiana University, where he designed his own major in “enigmatology.”

Crawfordsville to Greenfield: The portion of central Indiana through which today’s route passes was organized into the current counties in the 1820s. In 1818, two years after Indiana statehood, the Lenape (Delaware) nation ceded the territory under the terms of the Treaty of St Mary’s and moved further west (yet again). Whites called the area gained the “New Purchase.” Indianapolis was founded three years later. It became the state’s capital in 1825. It is the second largest city through which the tour passes, after Los Angeles. In 1970, Indianapolis and Marion Co consolidated their governments (excepting four suburban municipalities) into the Indianapolis “Unigov,” giving the city a current official population of 888,000. 

In 1827, the National Road reached Indianapolis, incorporating a main east-west thoroughfare, Washington St. Begun in 1811, the National Road was the nation’s first highway built by the federal government (and the second road to be macadamized). It played an important role in the development of the territories west of the Appalachians. The first segment connected the Potomac River at Cumberland, Maryland, to the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). It was then extended west with the intention of reaching the Mississippi at St Louis and ultimately Jefferson City, Missouri, the state’s capital, on the Missouri. In the 1830s, however, the Jacksonian Democrats, who controlled national government and opposed expenditures on “internal improvements,” terminated federal funding and made the construction and maintenance of the road the responsibility of the states. The National Road therefore came to its end in Vandalia, Illinois, then the state capital (although it connected there to a state road to St Louis, 140 miles west). In 1926, the federal government created a new system of federal highways. The National Road was incorporated into US 40, which extended from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to San Francisco. The first transcontinental highway, it was known as the “Main Street of America.” The CrossRoads route visits communities on the National Road (and old US 40) from Indianapolis to Richmond, Indiana. 

Indianapolis is perhaps best known as the home of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the annual Indy 500 car race on Memorial Day. (The ride route turns off 16th St about a half mile west of the race track.) Built in 1909, the Speedway is a 2.5 mile rectangular oval originally paved in brick and therefore known as “The Brickyard.” In 1961, the entire track was repaved in asphalt except for a three-foot strip at the starting/finish line – the “brick yard.” (Check out this clip of the closest finish in Indy 500 history, Al Unser Jr and Scott Goodyear racing yards apart at 223 mph, Unser crossing the bricks first by half a car length (0.043 sec) in 1992, his first of two wins.) In addition to the 500, the Speedway also hosts motorcycle races and Formula 1 and stock car (NASCAR) races. It is the largest capacity sports venue in the world, with seating for 257,000 spectators. The first Indianapolis 500 race (200 laps) was held in 1911. From 1972 to 2014, the festivities opened with a performance of “Back Home Again in Indiana” by Jim Nabors, TV’s Gomer Pyle (neither an Indiana native nor a resident), and the Purdue Marching Band before the announcer’s call, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Four drivers have won the event four times, A. J. Foyt, Al Unser, Rick Mears, and Helio Castroneves. In 2021, Castroneves set a new race record, finishing in 2:37:19, an average speed of 190.7 mph for 500 miles. Eddie Cheever recorded the fastest single lap, covering 2.5 miles in 0:38.1 (236.1 mph) in 1996. The winner receives a bottle of milk at the finish, a tradition established in the thirties by a winner who requested a glass of buttermilk – and an alert local dairy owner who recognized a marketing opportunity. The race track represents the city’s history as an early center of automobile manufacture. It was once home to 60 car makers, including Stutz, Duesenberg, and Marmon, second only to Detroit. The impresario of the Speedway, Carl G Fisher, founded a company that manufactured automobile headlights. 

At the center of the city is Monument Circle, around which you will pass. Built in 1902, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument is a 284.5’ obelisk honoring Hoosiers who served the nation in the Civil War and the other military conflicts up to that time. It is said to be the first memorial in the country to commemorate all who served, rather than specific individuals or units. 

In the early 1920s, Indiana and Marion Co were each strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan, part of a revival of the order that began in 1915, inspired by D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, a landmark work of cinema but an outrageous perversion of history. Indiana had the largest Klan in the country with 250,000 members, about 30 percent of the state’s native-born white men. The Klan’s newspaper, Fiery Cross, was published in Indianapolis. The organization was strongest in central Indiana. The governments in Indianapolis and Marion Co were “almost completely controlled by the Klan.” In 1924, the state elected a Klansman as governor and sympathetic majorities to the state legislature. In its second incarnation as in its first, the Klan was forthrightly racist (and antisemitic) but the fuel for its revival – and its appeal in northern states like Indiana (and Oregon, another stronghold) – was its program of “100% Americanism” and its animus to immigrants and Catholics in particular. In Indianapolis, the Klan rode a controversy over parochial school buildings and public school curriculum to power. In 1925, however, its Grand Dragon, D. C. Stephenson, was convicted in the abduction, sexual assault, and death (by suicide) of a girlfriend. If that were not discredit enough, when the governor did not come forward with a pardon, Stephenson revealed the Klan’s secrets to the newspapers. The Klan collapsed under the weight of the scandal. 

The most prominent company in Indianapolis today is Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical manufacturer. Founded in 1876, it introduced gelatin coatings for pills and capsules in the 1880s. In the twenties, it began to collaborate with medical researchers. It was the first producer of insulin in the twenties, a major producer of penicillin and the developer of the antiseptic Merthiolate in the forties, and the largest maker of the Salk vaccine for polio in the fifties. 

You will exit Indianapolis and ride most of the way to Greenfield on the Pennsy Trail, a bike trail built on the bed of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It’s about 100 yards south of the National Road, Old US 40. East of Indianapolis on the Marion-Hancock Co line is the tiny town of Cumberland, named for the National Road, which was also referred to by its point of origin in Maryland. In 2001, a fire tore through an early 20th century frame farmhouse on Old 40, revealing (to the astonishment even of the owners) a 170-year-old one-room log cabin that was fully encased within it, now reclaimed and restored. 

Several miles on, the Pennsy Trail ends and the route follows 40 into Greenfield. At the intersection of Main St (the National Road) and State St is the impressive Romanesque Hancock Co Courthouse and, catercorner, the town’s beautiful Masonic Hall. The route continues east and then north along Riley Park, in which stands the town’s Old Log Jail and a chapel moved from the hamlet of Philadelphia. Greenfield’s most famous native son is James Whitcomb Riley, for whom the park is named. Known as the “Hoosier Poet” for his dialect poetry and the “Children’s Poet” for his children’s verse, his most lasting work is his poem “Little Orphant Annie” (1885), which inspired the comic strip and the musical. His home is open for tours and a statue in his likeness stands in front of the courthouse.

Greenfield to Richmond: Today’s route follows the National Road (Old US 40) for almost its entire length. About 8 miles east of Greenfield is Knightstown, named for Jonathan Knight (1787-1858), who served as a surveyor on the original portion of the National Road from Cumberland to Wheeling and later as the chief civil engineer on the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) Railroad. Just past it, Old 40 crosses the Big Blue River and intersects with Old National Road in Raysville. Old National Road (off the route) is an original segment of the National Road, a narrow lane that follows the natural contours of the land, winding through the hills. When the National Road was incorporated into US 40 and improved in the 1930s, the new route bypassed a 2.3-mile portion and left it untouched; it ends at Ogden (although Old National Road continues another 1.8 mi into Dunreith, on Old 40). 

From Raysville east, the ride route passes through southern Henry Co. Ten miles to the north of Lewisville is New Castle, the county seat. Indiana is noted for its craze for high school basketball. Nine out of the world’s eleven largest high school gymnasiums are in Indiana and the largest of all is the New Castle Fieldhouse. The home court of the New Castle Chrysler High School Trojans, it seats 9325 (ten times the enrollment of the school). Two NCCHS graduates, Kent Benson and Steve Alford, were named Mr Indiana Basketball as seniors and led Coach Bob Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers to NCAA championships. Since 1990, New Castle has also been the home of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. New Castle was the birthplace of artist Robert Indiana (ne Clark), most famous for his pop art lithograph LOVE, L and tilted O perched atop V and E, the letters bright red against crisp blue and green. It was also the boyhood home of David Lee Roth, the lead singer of the rock band Van Halen. In the early 20th century, New Castle called itself the “Rose City” because of the flowers grown in some 100 greenhouses in the area. Particularly prized (and expensive) were the American Beauty roses produced by Herbert and Myer Heller, who pioneered the local industry. Floriculture in New Castle never recovered from a devastating tornado that hit the town in 1917. 

Continuing on the route on the National Road, Centerville was the original county seat of Wayne Co, before it was moved to Richmond in 1870. Founded in 1814, a decade before the arrival of the National Road, Centerville has a historic district of early 19th century clapboard houses built to the lot lines, butt against each other, several of which incorporate archways connecting their stables behind to the National Road in front. Richmond also laid claim to the title “Rose City.” Three generations of the Hill family, Joseph, his son Edward G, and Edward’s son Joseph H, grew roses and bred new hybrids in greenhouses all over the town. Edward Hill’s home on “Millionaire’s Row” (2037 E Main) was north of the Hills’ two original greenhouses. The parcel south of Glen Miller Park to its east and a tract in the northwest part of Richmond were later the site of Hill greenhouses covering more than 1.25 million square feet. Glen Miller Park is now the home of the Richmond Rose Garden, which has an extensive collection of roses and a fountain and garden honoring E. G. Hill. Also in Glen Miller Park is a statue of the Madonna of the Trail honoring pioneer women, one of 12 on the National Road (Old US 40), erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1928.  

The historic town of Richmond is west of the Whitewater River Gorge, which is now a public park. The gorge is between 200 and 300 ft wide and 50 and 80 ft deep. On the right (south) as you cross the bridge on Main St are the remnant footings of the National Road Bridge, a covered bridge that spanned the gorge 30 ft above the river, built in 1834 (and demolished in 1895). Richmond is the home of Earlham College, a liberal arts college established by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1847, located in the southwestern part of the town. Just off the route downtown is the city’s neoclassical railroad station, designed by the great Chicago architect Daniel H Burnham. Richmond’s most renowned company was the Wayne Corp, the manufacturer of the Wayne school buses familiar to generations of rural and suburban school children. 

Improbably, Richmond holds a central place in the annals of American music. In 1917, a local piano manufacturer, the Starr Piano Co, founded a record company, Gennett, named for brothers Henry, Fred, and Clarence Gennett (pronounced with a soft G), who managed it. In 1921, it built a recording studio in the Starr Co’s factory in Richmond. Louis Armstrong made his debut recordings in Gennett’s studio in 1923 as a member of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. They were the first recordings of Oliver and clarinetist Johnny Dodds as well. Armstrong’s playing on the cornet was so fluent and vibrant that he was made to stand 15 feet away from the acoustic recording horn so as not to overshadow the performance of the band’s leader, Joe “King” Oliver, a cornetist too. Gennett also waxed the first sides of the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (with the Wolverine Orchestra) in 1923, the jazz pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines (with Louis Deppe’s orchestra) in 1923, the blues guitarist Charley Patton in 1929 (issued by Paramount), and the accordionist and orchestra leader Lawrence Welk (“Wunnerful, wunnerful”) in 1928. Hoagy Carmichael’s debut recording session in 1927 included an instrumental version of his immortal “Stardust.” (Beiderbecke and the Dorsey brothers, trombonist Tommy and saxophonist Jimmy, may have been among the session players.)  In addition, Gennett recorded jazz greats Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Sidney Bechet; bluesmen Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Lemon Jefferson; country and bluegrass singers Gene Autry, Vernon Dalhart, Uncle Dave Macon, and Bradley Kincaid; gospel composers and singers Homer Rodeheaver and Thomas A. Dorsey (while he was a blues pianist known as Georgia Tom); and orchestra leaders Fletcher Henderson and Guy Lombardo. In the early twenties, during the Klan revival, Gennett recorded speeches by Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson and Klan songs such as “Onward Christian Klansmen” (to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers”) and (undoubtedly amusing to men who went around in cone-shaped hoods) “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan.” The same day Armstrong and Oliver’s Creole Band played their second recording session in 1923, 6000 Klansmen paraded through Glen Miller Park in front of 30,000 spectators. The piano factory and recording studio – and Gennett’s “Walk of Fame” – are on the west side of the gorge in Whitewater Gorge Park.