Columbus, IN
In the Columbus Municipal Airport terminal, on a field that spent years as Bakalar Air Force Base; the KBAK identifier still carries the name. Family-owned since the Blackerbys took over in 2006, with the father-son duo Wayne and Caleb running it today. Made-from-scratch breakfast and lunch with floor-to-ceiling windows on the taxiway; free Indiana fried biscuits start every table, and the menu runs classic breakfasts, omelets, and a page of Flight Specials. Open 7am to 2pm, seven days a week.
Operating since 1900; original marble counters, a Welte orchestrion, and a working soda fountain that doubles as a museum. Lunch, sodas, and sundaes. Columbus itself is the reason to linger: the American Institute of Architects ranks it the sixth most architecturally important city in the nation, with more than 70 works by Saarinen, Pei, and their peers; walk downtown after lunch.
This airport sits on the former Atterbury Army Air Field, a WWII training base established in 1942. Over 2,000 acres, it trained B-25 Mitchell and B-26 Marauder bomber crews and glider pilots. The base cost $4 million and had 100+ buildings — concrete was poured through the night to meet deadlines. Renamed Bakalar AFB in 1954 during the Cold War, it served as an Air Force Reserve training base until 1970. A restored WWII chapel on the grounds is dedicated to WASP pilot Jean Lewellen Norbeck, a Columbus native killed in service in 1944. The Atterbury-Bakalar Air Museum is on field.
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.
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.
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.
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.