New Castle’s silent Thunderbolt

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

Just south of Muncie, downtown New Castle is home to some compelling architecture. There’s the 1869 Henry County Courthouse for starters, but the city’s old YMCA -a four-story building erected in 19251 and designed in a restrained Renaissance Revival style- features an enormous bracketed cornice. The cornice does much of the architectural heavy lifting for the structure, but what sits above it is what intrigues me: a Federal Signal Thunderbolt 1000T tornado siren.

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Endangered: Indiana’s Floyd County Courthouse

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

A few days ago, Indiana Landmarks unveiled its annual 10 Most Endangered list that highlights historic places teetering on the edge of extinction. The 2026 list features its usual assortment of fascinating and unusual properties, but one entry genuinely caught me off guard: the City-County Building in New Albany, just across the Ohio River from Louisville.

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Then and now: Indy’s Lafayette Square Mall

Ted Shideler 6 Comments
Read time: 11 min.

I stopped by the shuttered Lafayette Square Mall in Indianapolis recently to take some photos and explore its last remaining store, Shoppers World. Then, as I was digging through the dusty directories of a fifteen-year-old laptop, I remembered that I’d been there when the mall was still sort of alive! Here are some before-and-after shots from 2018 and 2026.

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519 coffees

Ted Shideler 7 Comments
Read time: 3 min.

You and I must share some weird and wonderful interests if you’re reading this. Between old schoolhouses, historic courthouses, flowing wells, Revolutionary War Patriots, abandoned retail, and whatever else catches my attention, I rarely meet people in everyday life who get excited about the same obscure corners of history that we do! Your comments, messages, and shares have meant a lot, and your Ko-fi donations helped keep me going when money was scarce and life kept piling on. Thank you.

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Muncie needs a 160-foot Garfield

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they start thinking about what they’ll leave behind. Maybe it’s a family, a business, a body of work, or some lasting contribution to the community they call home. Today, I’m cementing my legacy by conceptualizing a 160-foot Garfield statue that should be erected across the White River in downtown Muncie.

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Indiana’s Dearborn County Home

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

Whether they’ve been schoolhouses, courthouses, churches, or infirmaries, I’ve seen a lot of old buildings over the years that have smacked me in the face by being far more grand than I expected. Dearborn County’s old County Home, down near Cincinnati, was one of them. I’d seen photos beforehand, but they didn’t prepare me for the real thing: a sprawling red-brick building stretched across a hilltop, framed by enormous old trees and crowned by a white wooden cupola that rises above everything else. What a landmark!

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Meijer on VHS: a nineties time capsule

Ted Shideler 9 Comments
Read time: 5 min.

If you’re not familiar with Meijer, it’s a Midwestern chain of superstores that are basically a much better Walmart. Be it said that I love Meijer! I’d probably get a Meijer tattoo across my bicep if it had the necessary real estate. I’ve written about the chain before, but today’s subject is a thirty-two-year-old VHS tape titled A Video Tour of Your New Meijer Stores!

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This home probably wasn’t Muncie’s old Mound schoolhouse

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

A house on Wheeling Avenue near the Delaware County Fairgrounds in Muncie has piqued my interest for years. It doesn’t take much imagination to see it as an old schoolhouse, and it sits just a few blocks north of where Center Township’s old District 9 building once stood. Could it be the old structure? I’m not so sure.

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The New Cumberland covered bridge in Matthews, Indiana

Ted Shideler 1 Comment
Read time: 4 min.

The metal truss bridges I occasionally write about are archaic holdovers from another age. They’re relics, and we’re fortunate they’ve survived at all! Still, I wonder about the crossings that predate those steel structures. About fifteen miles north of my house in the Grant County community of Matthews, a covered wooden bridge still stretches across the Mississinewa River. It’s a celebrated survivor doing what it’s always done.

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