Mom and I were out driving the other day and decided to head past the old Spartanburg High School. What could be better than visiting a spooky old burned-out landmark on Halloween? As we rounded the curve into Spartanburg proper, one thing was missing: the school. All that’s left is the staircase up the hill from Arba Pike.
Continue reading “The ghost of Spartanburg High School has finally vanished”
I’m late to the game here and am not exactly breaking any news, but the old Marsh Supermarket on Nichol Avenue in Anderson finally came back to relevance with its space split between the Needler’s Fresh Market grocery and Benge’s Ace Hardware. The west side of Anderson sorely needed something like this!
Continue reading “A new use for an old Marsh in Anderson”
If you’re aching for the chance to live in a one-room school but the old Lincoln Schoolhouse I wrote about a few weeks ago didn’t trip your trigger, you’re in luck: another schoolhouse long since converted into a house has been listed for sale. It’s the old Keller or Buttermilk School in Madison County’s Lafayette Township.
Continue reading “Another schoolhouse has hit the market”
The rubble from Muncie Mall’s old Sears had hardly settled before Hull Property Group’s demolition crew turned its attention to J.C. Penney. As of yesterday, another longtime anchor is coming down! Here’s a look back at the history of another store that served generations of Muncie shoppers.
Continue reading “No rest for the wreckers: Muncie’s J.C. Penney is coming down”
I finally crossed a long-awaited destination off my list yesterday. Years after first learning about Madison County’s elusive Larimore artesian well and four months of corresponding with its owners, I had the chance to see it up close! The well sits inside Hidden Canal Nature Preserve, a fifty-acre tract protected by the Red-Tail Land Conservancy, and my visit was more rewarding than I expected.
Continue reading “Madison County’s Larimore well was well worth the wait”
Each of Indiana’s ninety-two counties was home to at least one infirmary or poorhouse in the sometimes distant past. The facilities ran the gamut from stone structures built in the 1840s to Art Deco buildings put up a century later. A few were even newer, and one of the most recently-built ex-infirmaries I’ve seen sits in Jefferson County between Madison and Dupont.
Continue reading “Indiana’s Jefferson County Home”
It took more than three years to transform Muncie’s Sears superstore from proposal1 to reality2. Fifty-six years later, the demolition team needed just a month and a half to reduce the enormous building to rubble. As of yesterday, that’s all that remains of the first store to open at Muncie Mall3. I documented the process from the start in an effort to ttrace Sears’ final chapter.
Continue reading “Reduced to rubble: the Muncie Mall Sears is no more”
Two weeks ago, I wrote about an intriguing intersection in Henry County with a sign commemorating a long-gone one-room schoolhouse and a granite marker pointing towards a pioneer burial ground. Information about either place initially proved elusive, but that changed! On Sunday, I headed back for another look.
Continue reading “An intriuging intersection update”
I sold nearly fifty things on Facebook Marketplace while I was unemployed, and I’m still at it. I’ve offloaded everything from a General Foam Santa Choo-Choo to an antique grinding wheel- not to mention a 1943 Allis-Chalmers Model C tractor, a six-foot chainsaw, and a century-old chaplain’s pump organ that folded down to the size of a briefcase. I’m finally running out of things to deaccession now, which has me looking back on this ridiculous saga. Would I ever sell stuff on Marketplace again? Maybe, I guess, but only if I absolutely had to.
Continue reading “What I learned by selling a ton of stuff on Facebook”
For years, Kokomo, Indiana, was home to two malls that eventually took divergent paths. Kokomo Mall was the first and evolved from a conventional strip center into an enclosed shopping destination. Its younger rival, Markland Mall, ultimately proved more successful and survived as an enclosed shopping center. About fifteen years ago, Kokomo Mall came full circle and reinvented itself as the open-air Kokomo Town Center. It’s an unusual tale of two malls in one small city, and I had to learn more.
Continue reading “Kokomo Town Center: a mall de-malled”