Marion, IL
Williamson County Regional Airport sits six miles southeast of Marion with a single 6,502-foot 2/20 runway. The airport opened in 1970 to serve the Carbondale-Marion-Herrin metropolitan area and replaced the older municipal field. Marion's defining feature is the Marion Veterans Affairs Medical Center, opened 1942 — one of the original network of WWII-era VA hospitals built to handle the wave of returning veterans. Williamson County itself was at the heart of "Bloody Williamson," the 1920s coal-mining wars: the Herrin Massacre of June 22, 1922 — in which striking United Mine Workers killed 19 strikebreakers and 3 guards in cold blood at a captured mine — was the most violent labor incident in U.S. history. The trial of the union men ended in acquittal. Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge, just west, draws tens of thousands of wintering Canada geese and snow geese to the region every year. The Marion Cultural and Civic Center hosts the Southern Illinois Music Festival.
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.
Paducah is a UNESCO Creative City of Crafts & Folk Art — recognized internationally for its quilting heritage. The National Quilt Museum hosts the most important quilting collection in the world (600+ quilts in rotating exhibition). Each April, the AQS Quilt Show brings 30,000+ visitors. Lower Town historic district was Paducah's original 1827 settlement — now a beautifully restored arts colony of 19th-century brick row houses. The Ohio River floodwall murals (50+ painted panels by artist Robert Dafford) wrap the riverfront and tell Paducah's story from prehistoric to modern.
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.
Just up the road from the Henderson field is the ground John James Audubon walked when he ran a store here from 1810 to 1819 — and spent more time in the woods drawing birds than minding the counter. The state park named for him, built by the CCC in the 1930s in a storybook French-Norman style, holds a complete set of his Birds of America "double elephant" folio plus hundreds of original prints — the man who painted America's birds life-size, honored where he first studied them. For an app about flying, the first great American birdman is a fitting stop. From above it's a pocket of mature hardwood forest and a small lake against the Ohio River.