New Castle, IN
Bill Marlatt cut a 2,350-foot grass runway into Henry County in 1952 and kept building: first building on the field in 1953, 3,000 feet of runway by 1960, then a partnership with the city and county that paved and stretched it to 4,000 in 1965. When the new 4,200-foot runway was dedicated in 2018, the field was renamed New Castle Henry County Marlatt Field with 91-year-old Bill on hand in the rain; his son John manages the field today under the joint city-county aviation board. The growth has kept coming: the field became one of IU Health's LifeLine helicopter bases in 2019, and a courtesy car waits on a first-come basis for pilots flying in.
The largest high school basketball gym in the world, seating 8,424 in a bowl dug below ground level, and the town built it themselves; when the school board passed on a new gym in the 1950s, the community raised the money and opened the doors in November 1959. The title has slipped exactly once: a 2019 recount dropped the fieldhouse to third behind Seymour after old portable bleachers were sold off, and a 2020 renovation put it back on top. Ten of the twelve largest high school gyms in the country are in Indiana; this is the ceiling of the genre. The Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame sits next door on Trojan Lane, and the Hall of Fame Classic runs here every December.
America's first federally funded road, authorized in 1806 under Jefferson and built west from Cumberland, Maryland between 1811 and 1834; it carried the westward migration until the railroads took the traffic. Construction reached Indiana in 1829 and crossed 144 miles of the state by 1834, threading Richmond, Centerville, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute. Survivors still stand: the Huddleston farmhouse inn at Cambridge City, Centerville's 1830s rowhouse arches, and the Madonna of the Trail at the entrance to Richmond's Glen Miller Park, dedicated in 1928 near the site of Indiana's first toll gate on the road.
Indiana's longest historic operating railroad — 16 miles of track between Connersville and the historic canal town of Metamora. Steam and diesel excursions run weekends April through November along the Whitewater River valley. The railroad uses original 1880s right-of-way of the Whitewater Canal Railroad. Metamora at the western end is a preserved 1840s canal town with the only working aqueduct (Duck Creek Aqueduct, 1846) in the United States — a wooden bridge that carries the Whitewater Canal over a creek. Pair a fly-in to KCEV with a train ride to Metamora — best 1840s time-travel experience in Indiana.
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.