Connersville, IN
Connersville's aviation history runs deep. The town was once home to the McFarlan automobile (a luxury car competitor to Cadillac in the 1920s) and the Auburn aircraft connection — the historic Auburn Automobile / Cord / Duesenberg manufacturing region surrounds this part of east-central Indiana. The airport serves the Whitewater Valley area and provides access to the Whitewater Valley Railroad — Indiana's largest historic railroad with steam excursions running 16 miles between Connersville and Metamora.
Indiana's longest historic operating railroad — 16 miles of track between Connersville and the historic canal town of Metamora. Steam and diesel excursions run weekends April through November along the Whitewater River valley. The railroad uses original 1880s right-of-way of the Whitewater Canal Railroad. Metamora at the western end is a preserved 1840s canal town with the only working aqueduct (Duck Creek Aqueduct, 1846) in the United States — a wooden bridge that carries the Whitewater Canal over a creek. Pair a fly-in to KCEV with a train ride to Metamora — best 1840s time-travel experience in 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.
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.