Eminence, IN
Pam's Place has been flying since 1994: a 3,600-foot main grass runway and a short crosswind southwest of Eminence, edges marked by the grassline itself and the displaced thresholds by three traffic cones. No fuel on the field, but major airframe and engine repair, a 24-hour emergency phone in the hangar with the blue door, and a first-Saturday breakfast tradition that fills the turf with airplanes.
Indiana's largest waterfall by volume — upper and lower falls in a sandstone gorge on Mill Creek. Not dramatic by Niagara standards, but the gorge itself is striking from the air, cutting a dark seam through otherwise gentle terrain. A covered bridge (one of Parke County's neighbors) sits near the upper falls. Best after heavy spring rains when the falls are running full.
Indiana University's Bloomington campus is one of the most beautiful in the country — 1,900 acres of limestone gothic buildings set among old hardwoods, built almost entirely from the same Salem limestone quarried a few miles south around Bedford. The local stone gives the whole campus a unified warm-grey palette that shifts color with the light, and from the air that grey stone and the dense old-growth canopy are what set the campus apart from the town grid around it. The landmark a pilot will recognize is Memorial Stadium, on the north edge of campus — now the home of the 2025 national champions. Under coach Curt Cignetti (google him), Indiana football — the losingest program in the history of the sport coming into the season — went 16–0 and beat Miami for the first football national title in school history, behind Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza. The stadium and the domed Assembly Hall (basketball) next to it are the most identifiable structures on campus from altitude. At the heart of the old campus, the Sample Gates limestone arch opens onto Dunn's Woods, a preserved remnant of the original forest with the oldest buildings curving around it. If you land and make the trip into campus, two collections reward it: the Lilly Library holds a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare First Folio, and the manuscript of Lincoln's last public address; and Thomas Hart Benton's sweeping mural cycle "A Social History of Indiana," painted for the 1933 World's Fair, is installed in the IU Auditorium. Bloomington itself is a college town in the wooded hills of south-central Indiana, with the Brown County hills and the Nashville art colony just east and Lake Monroe to the southeast.
In 1926 the City of Indianapolis leased 200 acres on the southwest side for its first municipal airport, run by the Indiana National Guard's 113th Observation Squadron and named for Lt. Richard H. Stout, a decorated WWI veteran and Guard pilot killed in a crash at Fort Benjamin Harrison's Schoen Field. Transcontinental Air Transport made it a stop on the 48-hour New York-to-Los Angeles system: overnight train to Columbus, then Ford Trimotors west through Indianapolis. The field was too small to grow; Curtiss's local manager, WWI ace Harvey Weir Cook, pushed for the larger municipal airport that opened in 1931 and was later renamed in his honor. In WWII the Army leased Stout for a dollar a year as headquarters of the I Troop Carrier Command, directing glider training nationwide and worldwide air transport. Today it is the Indiana National Guard's Joint Forces Headquarters; the 1927 terminal building still stands.
Theodore Clement Steele was the leading painter of the "Hoosier Group," the Indiana Impressionists who carried American Impressionism into the Midwest around the turn of the 20th century. In 1907 Steele bought 211 acres of ridgetop in the wooded hills of Brown County, built a house and a big north-light studio, and named the place the "House of the Singing Winds" for the way the wind moved across the hilltop. His wife Selma planted gardens that became nearly as celebrated as his canvases. Steele''s arrival pulled other artists to Brown County. By the 1910s and 1920s the village of Nashville, a few miles east, had become the largest art colony in the Midwest — a community of landscape painters drawn by the same things Steele was: the soft folded hills, the autumn haze, the color, and the cheap land. The colony still operates. The Brown County Art Gallery and the Brown County Art Guild in Nashville hold the Hoosier Group legacy, and Nashville itself has grown into a town of galleries, craft studios, and shops that fills with leaf-peepers every October. The T.C. Steele State Historic Site preserves the house, the studio still hung with his paintings, and Selma''s restored gardens on the ridge, beside the Selma Steele State Nature Preserve. Brown County State Park — Indiana''s largest state park and the nature counterpart to the art colony — lies just E, and the two together make the Bloomington-Nashville hills one of the most-visited fall-color destinations in the state.