Madison Municipal

A deep canyon system with waterfalls just above the Ohio River at Madison, IN. Madison itself is one of the best-preserved 19th-century river towns in the Midwest — the entire downtown is a National Historic Landmark district. From the air, the contrast between the canyon's forested gorge and the river town below is dramatic. The Madison Regatta (hydroplane racing on the Ohio) every July is visible and audible from altitude.

133 blocks of preserved 19th-century architecture make Madison a National Historic Landmark District — more than any other small town in America. The town sits in a deep Ohio River valley with limestone bluffs rising on both sides, creating one of the most spectacular river approaches in the Midwest. The Lanier Mansion (1844) is a Greek Revival masterpiece, and downtown is packed with antique shops, river-view restaurants, and Federal-style homes. The Madison Regatta hydroplane races on the Ohio happen each July — viewable from above. Clifty Falls State Park is right at the field with a 60-foot waterfall in a sandstone canyon.

In April 1945, 101 Black officers of the 477th Bombardment Group (the Tuskegee Airmen) were arrested at Freeman Army Airfield in Seymour, IN for attempting to enter the whites-only Officers Club. Three were court-martialed. The 'Freeman Field Mutiny' became a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement and directly influenced President Truman's 1948 executive order desegregating the U.S. military. Before the mutiny, Freeman trained 4,245 multi-engine bomber pilots — 23 died in training. After, it became the Foreign Aircraft Evaluation Center where captured German jets, V-1 buzz bombs, and V-2 rockets were tested on American soil. WWII buildings still stand. The Freeman Army Airfield Museum preserves one of the most important — and least known — civil rights stories in American history.

At Clarksville and Jeffersonville, on the Indiana bank of the Ohio River across from Louisville, the river drops about 26 feet over a two-mile stretch of rapids — the only natural break in navigation on the entire 981-mile Ohio. The Falls of the Ohio decided where cities grew, because every downbound boat had to stop and portage or wait for high water. And at low water it reveals something extraordinary: one of the largest naturally exposed Devonian fossil beds in the world. The beds are about 390 million years old — a coral reef laid down when this ground was a shallow tropical sea near the equator. At low water, usually late summer and fall, hundreds of acres of fossil limestone emerge, dense with corals, brachiopods, crinoids, and trilobites preserved where they lived. The Falls of the Ohio State Park interpretive center sits on the bluff above the beds; the fossil flats are open to walk when the river allows. The Falls also anchor a piece of frontier and expedition history. George Rogers Clark staged from the Falls before his 1779 capture of Vincennes, and the town of Clarksville on the Indiana bank carries his name. William Clark met Meriwether Lewis at the Falls of the Ohio in October 1803; here they recruited the "Nine Young Men from Kentucky" before starting down the river — the formal beginning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition''s overland journey. A mile upstream in Jeffersonville, the Howard Steamboat Museum occupies the 1894 mansion of the Howard family, whose shipyard built the grandest steamboats on the western rivers for nearly a century. The mansion was built by the shipyard''s own craftsmen with steamboat-grade woodwork; the museum holds models, builder''s drawings, and the story of the Ohio River packet era. The McAlpine Locks move river barges around the drop; the working lock chambers are absorbing to watch from above.