Shelbyville, IN
KGEZ started as government infrastructure: intermediate landing field No. 8 on the Cincinnati-Chicago air mail airway, one of the Department of Commerce fields that kept Embry-Riddle's mail planes within reach of a safe landing between beacons. The proof is still on the field; a concrete direction arrow from the lighted-airway system survives here, pointing down the old route. The city took the field over in the 1950s, with FAA activation in November 1956, and built it into what pilots see today: a 5,000-foot grooved asphalt runway, a turf crosswind strip, self-serve 100LL, and Indiana Army National Guard helicopters based on the west side.
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.
Horseshoe Indianapolis (Indiana Downs when it opened in 2002, Indiana Grand from 2013, rebranded under Caesars in 2022) runs the only live Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse racing in Indiana, April into November, on a one-mile dirt track with a seven-eighths-mile turf course inside it. The Indiana Derby, the track's signature Grade III race, runs each July. The whole complex sits about a mile west of KGEZ.
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.
Indianapolis devotes more acreage to honoring its war dead than any other American city, and only Washington, D.C. has more war memorials. The center is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Monument Circle, a 284-foot limestone obelisk dedicated in 1902; raised for Indiana's Civil War dead, it honors Hoosier veterans of every war before World War I, and at completion it was the second-tallest monument in the country behind the Washington Monument. It stands at the exact center of the original city plan: Alexander Ralston, who had helped survey Washington, D.C., laid out Indianapolis in 1821 with the streets radiating from this circle. An observation level near the top is reached by 330 steps or a small elevator, and from it the flat grid of central Indiana runs to the horizon. Five blocks north, the Indiana World War Memorial Plaza is a corridor of formal malls, fountains, and monuments; its centerpiece, the Indiana World War Memorial, is a massive limestone building modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, housing the Shrine Room beneath a single suspended American flag. The American Legion keeps its national headquarters on the plaza. On the downtown canal, the USS Indianapolis Memorial honors the cruiser torpedoed in 1945, the worst single loss of life at sea in US Navy history, near the Medal of Honor Memorial along the canal walk.