Paoli Municipal

When it was completed in 1902, this 200-foot free-span dome was the largest in the world — bigger than the Pantheon in Rome, bigger than St. Peter's Basilica. It held the record until the Houston Astrodome in 1965. Called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World,' the hotel fell into disrepair but was restored in 2007. The circular dome is clearly visible from 3000ft. The dome is most photogenic from the south, with the valley's forested hills as backdrop.

You are landing at Virgil I. Grissom Municipal Airport. Seven miles south, inside Spring Mill State Park, the Gus Grissom Memorial holds "Molly Brown" — the Gemini 3 spacecraft Grissom flew in March 1965 on the first crewed Gemini mission. The airport carries his name; the park holds his spacecraft; he grew up twelve miles away in Mitchell, Indiana. Few general-aviation fields in the country bind their name, their region, and a national hero together this tightly. Virgil "Gus" Grissom was the second American in space (Mercury-Redstone 4, July 1961 — the "Liberty Bell 7" suborbital flight whose hatch blew open prematurely on splashdown and sank the capsule), the first American to fly in space twice (Gemini 3), and the commander of Apollo 1. He died with Ed White and Roger Chaffee in the January 27, 1967 cabin fire during a launch-pad test. He was 40. The memorial at Spring Mill tells his story through the Molly Brown capsule, his spacesuit, and personal artifacts. Spring Mill State Park is one of Indiana''s oldest and finest. Its centerpiece is Pioneer Village — a restored early-1800s limestone milling settlement built around a three-story gristmill still turned by water carried on a long wooden flume from a cave spring. The mill grinds corn for visitors. The surrounding karst holds Twin Caves (boat tours run into the cave on an underground stream), Donaldson Cave, and Bronson Cave, all cut into the Mitchell Plateau limestone that built southern Indiana — the same Salem limestone quarried up around Bedford. Donaldson Woods is a 67-acre old-growth forest that was never logged.

The hills of south-central Indiana sit on a thick bed of Mississippian limestone, and where rainwater has worked down through it for hundreds of thousands of years it has hollowed out one of the densest concentrations of caves in the eastern United States. This is karst country: sinkholes pock the fields, streams vanish into the ground and resurface miles away, and beneath the surface run miles of mapped passage. Marengo Cave, found in 1883 by two children, is a US National Natural Landmark and one of the most decorated show caves in the Midwest — dense with flowstone, soda straws, and the draperies and "cave coral" that form where mineral-laden water drips over millennia. It has been operated as a show cave continuously for well over a century. A few miles south, the Wyandotte Caves are among the largest cave systems in Indiana, with passages worked by Native peoples for thousands of years to mine chert and aragonite; "Monument Mountain," a huge underground breakdown pile inside Big Wyandotte, is one of the tallest underground features open to visitors anywhere. The same limestone built the surface country. The Mitchell Plateau quarries supplied the Salem limestone that faced the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and the National Cathedral — the Bedford limestone belt runs through the same country. Spring Mill State Park, with its cave-fed gristmill and its boat-tour caves, sits in the same karst belt to the N.

The Salem and St. Genevieve limestone quarried around Bedford built the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, the Lincoln Memorial, and 35 of the 50 state capitols. From the air, the massive open-pit quarries are a dramatic landscape — turquoise rectangles cut deep into the earth. The Indiana Limestone Heritage Festival each June celebrates the industry and stonecarving tradition. Just south, the town of Mitchell preserves Gus Grissom's boyhood home — the Mercury 7 astronaut, second American in space, who died in the Apollo 1 fire. The Gus Grissom Memorial includes his Gemini 3 capsule "Molly Brown."