Mount Vernon, IL
On the field inside the terminal, open seven days, 6 am to 8 pm, breakfast served anytime. This is the Mount Vernon outpost of the Bonnie Cafe family, named for the tiny village of Bonnie down Route 37 where the Hubbard family opened the original; three generations run five locations now, and this one landed at the airport in 2019. The draw is the all-you-can-eat buffet plus a full made-to-order menu (the four-egg Denver omelet has its devotees), a salad bar, and windows on the runway. Join the free Aviator Club and the fifth meal is on the house. The kind of field where pilots schedule an oil change around breakfast.
Mount Vernon Outland Field sits three miles west of downtown Mount Vernon with a single 6,499-foot 5/23 runway. The airport is named after Lt. Verle Edward Outland, a Mount Vernon-born U.S. Army Air Corps pilot killed in a training accident at Selfridge Field, Michigan on August 25, 1941. Mount Vernon was the historical seat of Jefferson County and the legal center of southern Illinois — Appellate Court of the Southern District has met here since 1855, and the original 1857 courthouse where Abraham Lincoln argued cases on the Illinois circuit still stands on the public square (now the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts). The Granada Theatre on Main Street, opened 1937 as an Art Deco movie palace, is back in operation as a live-performance venue. Mt. Vernon sits at the intersection of I-57 and I-64 — the original 1969 cloverleaf was, briefly, the most heavily traveled rural interchange in Illinois.
In the far southwest corner of Indiana, on a bend of the Wabash River, two of the most ambitious utopian experiments in American history played out on the same ground within twenty years of each other. The first was the Harmonists — German Lutheran separatists led by Father George Rapp, who believed the Second Coming was imminent and that they should prepare by building a perfect communal society. They arrived in 1814, drained the Wabash bottomlands, and raised a town of about 180 buildings — granaries, dormitories, workshops, a hedge labyrinth — housing 800 people who held property in common, practiced celibacy, and ran one of the most productive economies on the frontier. In 1824, convinced the moment had passed, Rapp sold the entire town and moved his followers back to Pennsylvania. The buyer was Robert Owen, the Welsh industrialist and social reformer, who meant New Harmony to be a model society built on education, equality, and reason rather than religion. He recruited a "Boatload of Knowledge" — leading scientists, educators, and artists who floated down the Ohio in 1825. Owen''s community collapsed within two years over disputes about governance and labor, but the scientists stayed. New Harmony became an early American center of geology and natural science, and the town claims the country''s first free public school, free library, and free kindergarten. The town preserves both layers. The 1822 Harmonist Labyrinth, a hedge maze symbolizing the path to harmony, has been restored. The Roofless Church (Philip Johnson, 1960) is a walled sacred space open to the sky. The Atheneum (Richard Meier, 1979) is a stark white modernist visitor center — one of Meier''s signature early buildings — that orients visitors before they walk the historic streets.
The Shawnee Hills are the worn-down stub of an ancient mountain range. About 320 million years ago they were tall — comparable to the modern Appalachians. Three hundred million years of wind, rain, freeze-thaw, and the periodic incursion of an inland sea reduced them to the modest 600-foot ridge that runs across the southern tip of Illinois between the Mississippi and the Ohio. The Shawnee National Forest (1939, 289,000 acres) was carved out of land that had been farmed unsuccessfully in the 19th century, then abandoned during the Dust Bowl years. Within the forest, the Garden of the Gods Wilderness (3,018 acres, designated 1990) is the most dramatic exposed sandstone in the Midwest. The bluffs along the south rim drop more than 100 feet to the forest below, and wind erosion has left a gallery of free-standing rock formations along the edge: Camel Rock (the most famous, featured on the 2016 Illinois state quarter in the US Mint's America the Beautiful series), Anvil Rock, Devil's Smokestack (a 30-foot sandstone pillar), Mushroom Rock, Table Rock. The quarter-mile Observation Trail is paved with natural sandstone flagstones and loops along the bluff edge with interpretive signs. The locals will tell you it is older than the famous Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs (the Colorado formations are Pennsylvanian-Permian, ~280-300 million years; the Illinois bluffs are Pennsylvanian, ~320 million). Both are right; both deserve the name. Admission is free. Pharaoh Campground adjacent has 12 primitive sites at $10/night, first-come-first-served. October is peak — fall foliage runs through the hardwood forest below the bluffs and the temperatures are perfect for the short hike.
The largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, just east of St. Louis. At its peak around 1100 AD, Cahokia had a population of 20,000+ — larger than London at the time. Monks Mound is the largest earthen structure in the Americas: 100 feet tall, covering 14 acres at its base. From the air, the geometric mound arrangement and the grand plaza are clearly visible. Most Americans have never heard of Cahokia — it's arguably the most underappreciated archaeological site in the country.
The 630ft Gateway Arch is the tallest man-made monument in the US — visible from 50+ miles in clear conditions. It marks the point where Lewis and Clark departed westward in 1804. Just 15nm north, the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers merge — two distinctly different colors of water flowing side by side for miles before mixing. Fly the river north from downtown St. Louis for both views. STL Class B airspace covers the downtown area.