Portland, IN
Portland's 45-acre field sits a mile northwest of downtown with a 4,000-foot strip, and once a year it turns into one of the state's livelier fly-in destinations: the Tri-State Antique Gas Engine and Tractor Show sets up alongside the field, and pilots park on the ramp and walk over to acres of running antique iron. The rest of the year it is a quiet, city-owned Jay County field.
The largest inland lake in Ohio (13,500 acres) — built in the 1840s as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, briefly the world's largest man-made lake. Today the lake is a recreation hub for west-central Ohio. The surrounding Mercer County is heavily German Catholic, and the "Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches" — over a dozen 19th-century churches with prominent crosses, visible for miles across the flat farmland. Maria Stein, Saint Henry, Cassella, and Minster all have stunning historic churches.
In the Quaker village of Fountain City, Indiana — called Newport before the Civil War — Levi and Catharine Coffin sheltered an estimated 2,000 freedom seekers escaping slavery between 1826 and 1847. So many passed through, and so reliably, that the Coffin house became known as the "Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad" and Levi Coffin as its unofficial "President." Not one person known to have been in the Coffins'' care was ever recaptured. The Coffins were Quakers who had moved north from North Carolina specifically to live where slavery was illegal. Their brick Federal house sat where three escape routes coming up out of the South converged, near the National Road corridor that made it a natural waypoint. Catharine organized a sewing society to clothe arrivals who had fled with nothing. The house had a concealed upstairs room behind a bed, a well inside the building so neighbors could not gauge from the household''s water use how many people were actually hidden inside, and a barn for hiding wagons. The Coffins later moved to Cincinnati and continued the work; Levi''s memoirs are a primary historical source, and the couple are widely believed to be the models for the Quaker couple Simeon and Rachel Halliday in Harriet Beecher Stowe''s Uncle Tom''s Cabin. The house is now the Levi & Catharine Coffin State Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark, with an adjacent interpretive center telling the broader story of the Underground Railroad through Indiana.
James Dean was born in Marion in 1931 and raised on his aunt and uncle's farm outside Fairmount, the town that buried him at Park Cemetery in 1955 and never stopped remembering. The James Dean Museum downtown, grown out of the Fairmount Historical Museum, holds the largest collection of his belongings anywhere, on loan from the Winslow family: two of his motorcycles, movie props, and a replica of his childhood bedroom with the actual furniture. The last full weekend of every September the festival swells this town of about 2,500 to something like 40,000, with a car show, a parade, and the look-alike contest. Fairmount's other export is Garfield; creator Jim Davis grew up on a nearby farm with a lot of barn cats.
The only museum in the world dedicated to the office of Vice President of the United States. Located in former VP Dan Quayle's hometown of Huntington, IN, the museum covers all 49 (and counting) Vice Presidents — from John Adams to the present. Quirky, unexpected, and surprisingly thorough — most visitors leave knowing more about the second-most-important office than they ever expected. A worthwhile detour for political and history fans.