Winchester, IN
Randolph County's field has served Winchester since June 1948, and it earns its keep as a working crossroads: about half the traffic in any given week is transient pilots passing through, the rest local flyers and county businesses, with the occasional air taxi mixed in.
In the Quaker village of Fountain City, Indiana — called Newport before the Civil War — Levi and Catharine Coffin sheltered an estimated 2,000 freedom seekers escaping slavery between 1826 and 1847. So many passed through, and so reliably, that the Coffin house became known as the "Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad" and Levi Coffin as its unofficial "President." Not one person known to have been in the Coffins'' care was ever recaptured. The Coffins were Quakers who had moved north from North Carolina specifically to live where slavery was illegal. Their brick Federal house sat where three escape routes coming up out of the South converged, near the National Road corridor that made it a natural waypoint. Catharine organized a sewing society to clothe arrivals who had fled with nothing. The house had a concealed upstairs room behind a bed, a well inside the building so neighbors could not gauge from the household''s water use how many people were actually hidden inside, and a barn for hiding wagons. The Coffins later moved to Cincinnati and continued the work; Levi''s memoirs are a primary historical source, and the couple are widely believed to be the models for the Quaker couple Simeon and Rachel Halliday in Harriet Beecher Stowe''s Uncle Tom''s Cabin. The house is now the Levi & Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark, with an adjacent interpretive center telling the broader story of the Underground Railroad through Indiana.
In the 1920s, the modest Gennett Records studio in Richmond recorded Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, and Charley Patton — capturing the birth of jazz, country, and blues. Gennett was the first to record many of these legends. The Walk of Fame downtown has bronze plaques at the original studio site in the Whitewater Gorge — a dramatic limestone canyon cut by the Whitewater River right through downtown Richmond. Earlham College (1847) is one of America's top Quaker institutions and adds a vibrant intellectual core to town.
The largest high school basketball gym in the world, seating 8,424 in a bowl dug below ground level, and the town built it themselves; when the school board passed on a new gym in the 1950s, the community raised the money and opened the doors in November 1959. The title has slipped exactly once: a 2019 recount dropped the fieldhouse to third behind Seymour after old portable bleachers were sold off, and a 2020 renovation put it back on top. Ten of the twelve largest high school gyms in the country are in Indiana; this is the ceiling of the genre. The Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame sits next door on Trojan Lane, and the Hall of Fame Classic runs here every December.
The largest inland lake in Ohio (13,500 acres) — built in the 1840s as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, briefly the world's largest man-made lake. Today the lake is a recreation hub for west-central Ohio. The surrounding Mercer County is heavily German Catholic, and the "Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches" — over a dozen 19th-century churches with prominent crosses, visible for miles across the flat farmland. Maria Stein, Saint Henry, Cassella, and Minster all have stunning historic churches.