Tell City, IN
Tell City — named for William Tell — sits on the Ohio River in southern Indiana. The town was settled by Swiss immigrants in 1858 and retains strong Swiss heritage. The Ohio River approach is dramatic with the Hoosier National Forest hills rising to the north.
Abraham Lincoln lived here from age 7 to 21 (1816-1830). His mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln is buried here. The living historical farm operates as it would have in the 1820s. From the air, look for the memorial building (a semicircular cloister) and the cabin site clearing in the surrounding hardwood forest. Lincoln left Indiana by flatboat down the Ohio River — you can trace his route from the air flying south to the river.
Bill Monroe — the inventor of bluegrass music — was born in Rosine, Kentucky, just east of Owensboro. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum downtown tells the genre's story from its 1940s origins to today. Across town, mutton barbecue (slow-smoked sheep, a Western Kentucky regional specialty) reigns at Moonlite, Old Hickory, and other spots. Owensboro's annual International Bar-B-Q Festival each May draws 80,000+ to celebrate burgoo (the traditional regional stew) and mutton. From the air, the Ohio River curves dramatically around the city.
The hills of south-central Indiana sit on a thick bed of Mississippian limestone, and where rainwater has worked down through it for hundreds of thousands of years it has hollowed out one of the densest concentrations of caves in the eastern United States. This is karst country: sinkholes pock the fields, streams vanish into the ground and resurface miles away, and beneath the surface run miles of mapped passage. Marengo Cave, found in 1883 by two children, is a US National Natural Landmark and one of the most decorated show caves in the Midwest — dense with flowstone, soda straws, and the draperies and "cave coral" that form where mineral-laden water drips over millennia. It has been operated as a show cave continuously for well over a century. A few miles south, the Wyandotte Caves are among the largest cave systems in Indiana, with passages worked by Native peoples for thousands of years to mine chert and aragonite; "Monument Mountain," a huge underground breakdown pile inside Big Wyandotte, is one of the tallest underground features open to visitors anywhere. The same limestone built the surface country. The Mitchell Plateau quarries supplied the Salem limestone that faced the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and the National Cathedral — the Bedford limestone belt runs through the same country. Spring Mill State Park, with its cave-fed gristmill and its boat-tour caves, sits in the same karst belt to the N.
Corydon was the capital of Indiana from 1816, when Indiana became a state, until 1825, when the seat of government moved to the new and more central city of Indianapolis. The first state capitol — a square Federal building of locally quarried blue limestone, finished in 1816 — still stands on the town square as a state historic site. The Indiana Constitution was drafted in town; tradition holds the delegates worked in the shade of a huge elm during the summer heat, and the preserved trunk of that "Constitution Elm" is sheltered under a sandstone monument a few blocks away. Corydon also holds a distinction no other Indiana town wanted. It is the site of the only pitched Civil War battle fought on Indiana soil. On July 9, 1863, Confederate cavalry under General John Hunt Morgan — on the raid that became the deepest Confederate push into Northern territory of the war — ran into the Corydon Home Guard: roughly 450 hastily assembled locals defending the state's former capital. The whole thing was over in under an hour. Morgan's cavalry took the town, levied a ransom on the mills, and rode on — having technically lost the only Civil War battle Indiana would ever host while clearly winning it. Morgan himself was run down and captured in Ohio three weeks later. The town square preserves the old capitol, the Governor's headquarters building, and a walkable district of 19th-century storefronts. The Battle of Corydon site south of town is marked with interpretive signage.