Read time: 11 min.

If it wasn’t evident from yesterday’s schoolhouse post, I love things with strange names. Cornbread Road is a rural stretch of Indiana pavement that travels four-and-a-half miles between the south sides of Yorktown and Muncie. Although it received fifteen minutes of fame from its “appearance” in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I haven’t been able to uncover any extraterrestrial visits over the course of Cornbread Road’s history. Nevertheless, the rural stretch of pavement is pretty interesting in its own right. 

In high school, I had a friend from Mendota, Illinois -population all of 7,061- who howled with laughter at the notion that the corn belt of Indiana actually had a road with such a cornpone name as Cornbread. I can’t say I blame her. It is funny! The road is also old, appearing on Kingman Brothers’ 1874 plat map of Delaware County¹. That year, three miles of it stretched east from Mt. Pleasant Township’s District 10 schoolhouse to the Muncie & Middletown Pike, now known as Hoyt Avenue². 

Cornbread Road got its name because it led to a mill³. First known as Hurst’s⁴, George R. Gamble acquired the property in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Gamble’s flour mill sat a mile and a half southwest of Muncie on Middletown Pike, but it didn’t last long before it burned in the summer of 1881⁵. By the following year, Gamble rebuilt the mill for $7,000⁶ and even planned to establish a paper mill on site, contingent on convincing investors to fund it⁷. That never happened. Instead, Gamble leased the mill to Morris Kidnocker⁸, and it became known as the Kidnocker Mill⁹.

Griffing, Gordon, & Company’s 1887 atlas of Delaware County placed the Kidnocker Mill in the triangle of land formed between today’s Cowan Road, Hoyt Avenue, and Buck Creek. The road to the mill was corduroy back then, a bumpy path typically built through wetlands by placing logs perpendicular to the roadway. Later accounts listed Cornbread Road as one of the roughest in the county¹⁰! Nevertheless, that bumpy road was how early settlers got their grain ground into meal.

Enoch Witt acquired the mill by 1890 and operated it until it burned again in 1895¹¹. John W. Thomas moved to the property two years later and established a farm¹². There, an “old mill hole” existed where the buildings once stood until it was eventually filled in to be used as a cow pasture. Later, Thomas’ farm was bisected by a new alignment of Cowan Road¹³. Today, nothing remains of the mill that gave Cornbread Road its name.

Last weekend, my brother and I got lunch at El Rancho Poblano in downtown Yorktown. On the way home, I drove Cornbread Road from end to end, starting from its western terminus four blocks south of the restaurant. The road meets Broadway Avenue just southeast of Yorktown’s old grain elevator. The rusting remains of the structure can be seen to the left of the stop sign in the photo above.

The segment of Cornbread Road in Yorktown was platted in 1893 as Sutherland Street, part of the Western Improvements Company’s Westside Addition to West Muncie¹⁴. West Muncie was a prospective resort community predicated on the gas boom. Aside from glass plants; a strawboard factory; and attractive streets named Adaline, Weller, New York, Russ, and Colley; the development was centered around Lake Delaware¹⁵.

From its intersection with Broadway, Cornbread Road angles northeast for a fifth of a mile before it crosses Buck Creek. There, the road meets what’s left of West Muncie’s centerpiece. Also known as Gas Lake, the body of water measured 3/4 a mile long and half a mile wide, and an elaborate, 72-room hotel called the Lake View sat on its banks. Unfortunately, the lake’s earthen dam failed in 1893 and 1896, and the entire enterprise was shuttered soon after. Today, West Muncie’s generally known as part of Yorktown.

This segment of Cornbread Road wasn’t completed until around 1908, when it was first visible on a post office map showing rural delivery service in the area¹⁶. The road once crossed Buck Creek over a one-lane iron bridge, later replaced by an uninspired concrete span in 1976¹⁷. Here, the roadbed sits a hundred and fifty feet south of Lake Delaware’s old dam and about eighteen feet above the former lake bed.

The route continues east past Buck Creek for three-fifths of a mile before it encounters an old alignment. This part of Cornbread Road was original to its construction but was bypassed in 1978 to eliminate a sharp S-curve¹⁸ that had been the site of seventy crashes and seven deaths between 1960 and 1972¹⁹. Today, the road flows smoothly around the sudden series of turns.

Officials were proud of their life-saving stretch of new pavement: county commissioners, the county council president, and administrators from the Muncie Paving Company attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new alignment on November 6, 1978²⁰. Today, the bypassed segment, about 340 feet long, provides access to a pair of houses.

From the old alignment, Cornbread Road straightens and assumes the characteristics of a rural country route. It passes Cook and Edgewood additions towards Nebo Road, where the newer stretch meets its original segment and the L-shaped First Freewill Baptist Church. The church was designed to wrap around the congregation’s old sanctuary, originally Mt. Pleasant Township’s District 7 schoolhouse. The school, known as Center, closed in 1919²¹ and was converted into a home until the assembly began meeting there in 1965²².

Cornbread Road continues for a mile before it reaches Proctor Road, also known as Williams Road²³ after the William Y. Williams farm, which sits just north of the intersection. Born near Eaton, Ohio, in 1812, Williams walked to Indianapolis with $150 his father gave him to buy a farm southwest of Muncie. After returning to Eaton on foot, he came to Muncie in 1837 along with his wife, Sarah. Eventually, Williams traded his farm for 280 acres a mile to the west²⁴. Remarkably, sixty-nine acres of the property are still owned by Williams’ descendants.

The next stretch of Cornbread Road was first paved with tarvia -a material made from coal tar- in 1930 to provide easy access to the Warner Gear plant just northwest of the Williams farm. The road crosses Buck Creek a fifth of a mile before it reaches Tillotson Avenue, a major north-south thoroughfare in Muncie. This area of Cornbread Road has probably seen the most changes of any stretch since Tillotson was extended to cross Cornbread as it made its way towards Hoyt Avenue²⁵ and the Muncie bypass in 1979.

Just south, the $22 million Wilson Middle School was completed in 1994. Muncie was expanding, and Cornbread Road saw an enormous increase in traffic. Today, more cars travel down the road than ever: the sprawling middle school became Delaware County’s de facto courthouse, officially the Delaware County Justice and Rehabilitation Center, in 2021.

Cornbread Road enters its final stretch a third of a mile east of Tillotson where three massive gravel pits frame the old thoroughfare. In 1922, the Muncie Stone and Lime Company began operations at Cornbread on the property known as Milligan’s Quarry²⁶, drilling twenty-foot holes into the ground to blast soil from the surface to haul stone up in cable cars²⁷. By 1927, the operation on Cornbread Road was the largest producer of crushed stone in the area²⁸!

The quarries on Cornbread Road were eventually acquired by Irving Brothers Sand & Gravel. The oldest pit began filling with water around 1979. It was nearly full in 1982, spilling through a tunnel to a newer quarry to the west. A year later, the northern gravel pits were considered abandoned²⁸, but the quarry to the south is still operated by imi Aggregates today.

Just past the quarries, Cornbread Road reaches Hoyt Avenue and curves southeast. This is the site of the Hurst/Gamble/Kidnocker/Witt mill and the end of the road. A billboard does little to commemorate the area’s history, which is a shame! Mills played a huge role in Delaware County’s development and were essential for early settlers, providing a means to process food, fostering self-sufficiency, contributing to community development, and facilitating economic growth.

Although the mill is long gone, we’re lucky to have Cornbread Road and its unusual name as a reminder of its existence. I never dreamed I’d write 1,400 words about it, but now that I have, I think it’s time to run to the store and pick up a couple boxes of Jiffy mix.

Sources Cited
1 Kingman Brothers. (1874). Map of Delaware County, Indiana. Chicago, IL.
2 Water Company Extending Service to Additions (1987, January 29). The Muncie Star. p. 21.
3 Greene, D. (1978, January 14). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 20.
4 A Paper Mill (1881, August 1). The Muncie Morning News. p. 1. 
5 City News (1882, May 19). The Muncie Morning News. p. 1. 
6 (See footnote 5).
7 (See footnote 4).
8 (see footnote 5).
9 Greene, D. (1975, April 29). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
10 Greene, D. (1953, August 19). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 6.
11 Loss and Insurance (1895, April 18). The Muncie Daily Times. p. 1.
12 John Wesley Thomas (1945, March 21). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 9.
13 Greene, D. (1975, May 13). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
14 Hefel, T.C. (1893). Western Improvements Co. Westside Add. to West Muncie. Delaware County Clerk (Muncie). Map.
15 Stodghill, D. (1981, November 13). Dreams for West Muncie washed away. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 2.
16 Map of Delaware County, Indiana showing rural delivery service (1908). United States Post Office Department (Washington, D.C.). Map.
17 Shepherd, S. (1975, June 19). Cornbread bridge draws one bidder. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 1.
18 Cornbread Reconstruction (1978, November 7). Cornbread Reconstruction. The Muncie Star. p. 7.
19 Dangerous Curve On Cornbread Road (1972, August 17). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 4.
20 (See footnote 18).
21 Delaware County Public Schools. (1918). School directory, Delaware County public schools, Delaware County, Indiana 1917-1918. Muncie, IN. 
22 Greene, D. (1969, September 26). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4. 
23 Cornbread Road is Hard Surfaced (1930, August 28). The Muncie Star. p. 16.
24 Greene, D. (1963, March 7). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 4.
25 Yencer, R. (1979, July 4). Street Sweeping Operations Upgraded With New Machines. The Muncie Star. p. 5.
26 Spurgeon, B. (1995, June 6). Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 6.
27 Stone Crusher Keeps Going To Meet Demand (1923, October 30). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 6.
28 Crushed Stone Demand Is Met (1927, June 20). The Muncie Star. p. 6.
28 Police issue warning for quarry-swimmers (1983, August 22). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 3.