Franklin, IN
For most of its life this was the Mullendore airport: the family strip south of Franklin has been flying since the early 1940s, Johnson County's oldest field, with Don and Jessica Mullendore living beside the runway and running it for decades. The family also sent one of its own to the Statehouse; H. Jack Mullendore held the county's seat in the Indiana House into the late 1980s. Now under different ownership, the 2,400-foot asphalt strip, all 35 feet wide, is home to more than 40 based aircraft plus a paragliding school and tent camping on the field; still the quiet, close-in alternative south of Indianapolis.
Horseshoe Indianapolis (Indiana Downs when it opened in 2002, Indiana Grand from 2013, rebranded under Caesars in 2022) runs the only live Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse racing in Indiana, April into November, on a one-mile dirt track with a seven-eighths-mile turf course inside it. The Indiana Derby, the track's signature Grade III race, runs each July. The whole complex sits about a mile west of KGEZ.
Columbus, Indiana — population about 50,000 — ranks sixth on the American Institute of Architects'' list of US cities for architectural innovation and design, behind only Chicago, New York, Washington, Boston, and San Francisco. How a small diesel-engine manufacturing town in southern Indiana came to hold more than 90 significant modernist buildings, six of them National Historic Landmarks, is a story about one man and one idea. J. Irwin Miller ran Cummins, the engine maker headquartered in Columbus. In 1954 he created a foundation program with an unusual offer: if the local school board or another public body hired an architect from a foundation-curated list of the best designers in the world, the Cummins Foundation would pay the design fee. The town said yes, again and again, for fifty years. Columbus filled with work by Eero Saarinen, Eliel Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Robert Venturi, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, Cesar Pelli, and Kevin Roche. The landmarks: First Christian Church (Eliel Saarinen, 1942) was one of the first contemporary churches in America. North Christian Church (Eero Saarinen, 1964, his final work) is a hexagonal building with a 192-foot spire rising from a single central oculus. The Miller House (Eero Saarinen, 1957) — Miller''s own residence, with interiors by Alexander Girard and landscape by Dan Kiley — is one of the most important modernist houses in the country, now owned by Newfields and open for tours. The Irwin Conference Center (formerly Irwin Union Bank, Eero Saarinen, 1954) floated a glass-walled bank on slender columns downtown. Add the Bartholomew County Library (I.M. Pei, 1969) with Henry Moore''s "Large Arch" bronze out front, and dozens more.
Before radio navigation, pilots flew the mail down chains of lighted beacons: 50-foot steel towers with rotating lights, each marking a 70-foot concrete arrow on the ground pointing the way to the next station. The lighted airway through central Indiana was the Cincinnati-Chicago route by way of Indianapolis, and Embry-Riddle flew the CAM-24 mail over it starting in the late 1920s. Most of the system is gone, but a preserved arrow survives at Shelbyville Municipal, which began life as the airway's intermediate landing field No. 8; a few more arrows hide in the fields of Shelby and Rush counties east of town. The arrows were poured between 1926 and 1932, then radio made them relics inside a decade.
Called 'The Little Smokies' for the blue haze that fills the hollows, Brown County has Indiana's most dramatic topography — rugged, deeply forested hills that look nothing like the flat farmland 30 miles north. Peak fall color is typically the third week of October, when the entire 16,000-acre park turns into a patchwork of red, orange, and gold. Nashville, IN (the town, not Tennessee) is a charming artist colony below. The terrain change is dramatic at the boundary of the Knobstone hills.