Greenfield, IN
In Greenfield's 1909 Carnegie library building downtown; a restaurant since 1999, relaunched October 2025 by the Burgess Restaurant Group after the founding chef retired, keeping a few signature dishes and leaning into the library theme. Steaks, pasta, and seafood; lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. Greenfield is James Whitcomb Riley's hometown; the Hoosier Poet's birthplace and museum sit a few blocks away.
Pope Field is the kind of airport that barely exists anymore: forty-two acres of grass, a single 2,165-foot turf runway running north and south, privately owned by Pope Airport Inc. and open to anyone. The field has been on the federal books since June 1945, and a dozen-plus airplanes live there. It sits two miles northeast of Greenfield, the county seat where James Whitcomb Riley grew up; the poet's boyhood home still stands on Main Street, and the town throws a festival in his name every October.
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.
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.
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.
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.