South Bend, IN
Dinner in Clement Studebaker's mansion: the wagon-empire co-founder built Tippecanoe Place in 1889, forty rooms of Richardsonian Romanesque by architect Henry Ives Cobb, and named it, the favorite telling goes, for his friend Benjamin Harrison, the newly elected president, whose grandfather won the 1811 battle. A fire nearly took the house its first year; it was rebuilt, outlived Clement, served as a Red Cross headquarters and then a school, and has been a restaurant since 1980. The grand staircase still deserves its moment, twenty fireplaces still stand, a self-guided tour comes free with dinner, and a brewery upstairs pours Studebaker-badged beers. A National Historic Landmark since 1977. Reserve ahead and confirm hours; the schedule has shifted over the years, and Notre Dame football weekends overwhelm the book. The Studebaker National Museum, wagons to Avanti, is a short walk west.
South Bend was a Studebaker town for over a century — the company built wagons here before the Civil War and automobiles into the 1960s. The Studebaker National Museum downtown holds presidential carriages (Lincoln's last carriage is there) and the cars themselves. The University of Notre Dame sits on the north side of the city; on football Saturdays the airport sees more bizjet traffic than most regional airports see in a month. KSBN has a 8,400-foot runway and full ILS approaches, making it the most capable airport in the region — the kind of field that handles a Cessna and a Gulfstream IV with equal ease.
South Bend (KSBN) was a company town, and two of those stories sit a block apart downtown. The Studebaker brothers started as blacksmiths and wagon-makers in 1852, grew into the largest wagon manufacturer in the world, then made the rare jump from horse-drawn vehicles to automobiles, building cars here until the plant closed in 1963. The Studebaker National Museum has the company's own collection: Conestoga wagons, the streamlined postwar cars Raymond Loewy designed, and the carriage that carried Lincoln to Ford's Theatre the night he was shot, one of only a handful of presidential carriages left. A block over, the Oliver Mansion (Copshaholm) is the 1896 Romanesque stone house of James Oliver, who made his money on the chilled-iron plow that broke the heavy Midwest soils; it keeps its original furnishings nearly intact. This is the South Bend most people drive past on their way to Notre Dame.
The "House that Rockne Built" — Notre Dame Stadium has hosted Fighting Irish football since 1930. The famous "Touchdown Jesus" mural on the Hesburgh Library's south facade rises 132 feet, hands raised, visible from the stadium and from the air. Notre Dame's campus is a postcard from above — the Golden Dome of the Main Building, the stadium, the lakes, and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart all visible together. KEKM is the closest GA airport for Notre Dame visits — KSBN is right at the stadium but is a primary commercial airport. Game days are special; the campus year-round is beautiful.
Indiana's only operational lighthouse — a striking white tower at the entrance to Michigan City harbor on Lake Michigan. The current structure dates to 1904, replacing the original 1858 lighthouse. The Old Lighthouse Museum next door tells the story of Great Lakes shipping and Indiana's small but vital lakefront. From the pattern at KMGC, the lighthouse is an unmistakable landmark. Combine with a beach walk on Washington Park Beach (one of Indiana's few sand beaches) and the Indiana Dunes National Park stretching west.
Lake Maxinkuckee is the second-largest natural lake in Indiana — a clear, spring-fed glacial lake of about 1,800 acres in the northern Indiana lake country. On its northwest shore sits the town of Culver, and on the lakefront sits one of the most distinctive prep schools in America: the Culver Academies, founded in 1894. Culver is best known for two things. The Culver Black Horse Troop is a mounted unit of cadets that has ridden in nearly every presidential inaugural parade since 1913 — a column of matched black horses that is one of the most recognizable units in American ceremonial life. And the Culver equestrian program is one of the largest school horse operations in the country, keeping a herd well over a hundred head, with a riding hall the size of a small arena. The campus is a collection of collegiate-gothic and Georgian buildings along the water, with a chapel and a memorial to alumni lost in the world wars. Culver''s summer naval program teaches seamanship on the lake from a fleet of sailing dinghies; the sailing and crew traditions are as old as the cavalry. Lake Maxinkuckee was a Gilded Age summer-resort lake — the humorist George Ade kept a place nearby, and cottages still ring the shore. The lake is a glacial kettle, gouged and then filled when the last ice sheet retreated, and its depth and clarity are unusual for Indiana.