Anderson, IN
Anderson's oldest restaurant, serving since 1954: a bright yellow box with a tear-shaped sign on the roof, 27 seats, and a model train looping the dining room overhead. The Onionburger is the move; sauteed onions cooked between two thin patties, thin enough that regulars order doubles. A lemon shake to wash it down; the place earns its name, and there's a basket of free lemon drops at the register on the way out. The house line is that they seat 300, just 27 at a time. Open 10:30 to 9, closed Sundays.
The first Anderson Airport was the Darlington family's doing: barnstormers rented corners of Myrtle Darlington's farm south of town in the 1930s, and her sons Art and Lewie turned it into a working airfield by 1938, flying as Anderson Aviation. The name moved with the airport. When General Motors' Anderson operations outgrew the old field, the city broke ground on the current State Road 32 site in March 1959; the first airplane landed the following January, and 15,000 people turned out for the July 1960 dedication. Today Darlington Field runs a 5,400-foot primary runway and its own city-operated FBO, three miles east of 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.
James Dean was born in Marion in 1931 and raised on his aunt and uncle's farm outside Fairmount, the town that buried him at Park Cemetery in 1955 and never stopped remembering. The James Dean Museum downtown, grown out of the Fairmount Historical Museum, holds the largest collection of his belongings anywhere, on loan from the Winslow family: two of his motorcycles, movie props, and a replica of his childhood bedroom with the actual furniture. The last full weekend of every September the festival swells this town of about 2,500 to something like 40,000, with a car show, a parade, and the look-alike contest. Fairmount's other export is Garfield; creator Jim Davis grew up on a nearby farm with a lot of barn cats.
Built by the Indianapolis Water Company between 1941 and 1943 by damming Fall Creek, Geist filled to capacity on March 17, 1943 as the second-largest man-made lake in Indiana; it still helps supply Indianapolis water today. Under the surface lies Germantown, a village founded in 1834 that the water company bought out and flooded; 45 homesteads went under. The long branching arms wind between the subdivisions of the city's northeast side, a magnet for boaters since the boating ban lifted in 1953 and a familiar shape from the air.
America's first federally funded road, authorized in 1806 under Jefferson and built west from Cumberland, Maryland between 1811 and 1834; it carried the westward migration until the railroads took the traffic. Construction reached Indiana in 1829 and crossed 144 miles of the state by 1834, threading Richmond, Centerville, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute. Survivors still stand: the Huddleston farmhouse inn at Cambridge City, Centerville's 1830s rowhouse arches, and the Madonna of the Trail at the entrance to Richmond's Glen Miller Park, dedicated in 1928 near the site of Indiana's first toll gate on the road.