Most people drive past the McDonald’s at Charles and Madison in Muncie without giving it a second thought. After all, it’s just another fast-food restaurant. Look just to the left, though, and you’ll find one of Indiana’s most remarkable surviving roadside landmarks: a giant neon sign from 1958 featuring a grinning mascot with a hamburger-shaped head! Long before Ronald McDonald and supersized meals, this downtown corner marked the arrival of a fast-food revolution in Muncie.

I’m normally pretty good at researching old common schoolhouses, but those operated by religious organizations tend to stymie me. Their histories rarely show up in the records I rely on, and the paper trail often fades fast. That was the case with the old New Garden Academy a mile south of Fountain City! I spun my wheels for a while before an unexpected breakthrough in the form of an obscure book tucked away in my mom’s office.

As an unincorporated village in rural Tipton County away from nearly every highway, Curtisville is the kind of place you don’t venture to unless you’re really looking for stuff. As it happened, I was! A stray social media post mentioned an old gym in town, which was enough to send me digging. It took some effort to track down, but once I did, parts of a story started to come into focus.