Read time: 5 min.

I tested positive for COVID yesterday. I feel terrible and my workplace doesn’t seem to have any established protocols, so I’m spending the day at home. Back during the pandemic, I got my initial vaccination at the Elks Lodge in Hartford City. I figured it’d be better than milling around at Walmart, and I might get a pitcher of beer to boot! The highway was closed, so I took a rural route that passed three schoolhouses. I snapped photos with a new-to-me old DSLR and eventually made it to fourteen in Blackford County. Sometimes, starting a project is as simple as that- so long as you just do it. 

I think I’ve told this story ad nauseam, but here it goes: after my grandma retired, she volunteered for the Delaware County Historical Society. During the summer of 2003 my mom drove her around the county to take pictures of some of its remaining one-room schoolhouses. I was twelve and tagged along, enthralled by the notion that so many of those old buildings were hiding in plain sight. After I grew up, I decided to complete the project for myself. 

After I was done with Delaware County’s, I started with the schoolhouses in Blackford based on the photos I took as I went for my vaccine. I was still enchanted by old schools, and finding each of them on Google Maps felt like stumbling across a secret treasure. Seeing them in person was even more rewarding! Schoolhousery was the perfect pandemic activity. 

Soon I was on to Hamilton, Madison, and Randolph Counties. I learned a lot about the rural education of our ancestors, and I’d have missed out on a lot of local history if I hadn’t decided to do the research and hop in the car. Today, some of the buildings I took photos of just a few years ago have already been demolished. I wouldn’t have had a chance to see them if I’d waited. Fortunately, I just did it.

My introduction to courthouses was similar. My brother and I passed a lot of them on trips to my dad’s house every other weekend, and I was quite young when I realized how fantastic our state’s portfolio is. When I was twenty, I ordered a book called The Magnificent 92 that purported to document each of them. 

Unfortunately, some of the photos were shots that left me wanting. There wasn’t a great resource online to satiate my curiosity back then, so I hit the road. It took three years of occasional day trips, but I finally made it to all of them! It’s been forty-five years since a historic courthouse has been demolished in Indiana, but some have been changed and altered since I first ventured out. Again, I just did it! I hate to sound highfalutin, but now there’s a photographic record of the buildings from 2018 to 2021.

My latest flight-of-fancy has been AT&T’s old Long Line telephone network towers. I think there are about a hundred in Indiana, and I’ve been to fifty-two towers and central offices since I started last October. I’d been curious about them since I was a kid. When I discovered one looming over my workplace, I was sure to snap a photo. A week later, I was on my way home from Richmond when I passed another near Lynn. 

Most of the old Long Line towers are still in use for some telecommunications purpose. They’re probably expensive to demolish, and I don’t think they’re endangered like some of our old schoolhouses. Nevertheless, I’ve made quick progress of taking photos of them in the northern part of the state, and I wouldn’t have started if I hadn’t just jumped right in. If you have some esoteric interest, I urge you to do the same! 

I have more statewide projects to complete after I wrap up the Long Lines. For starters, I’d like to go to all of Indiana’s poor farms and county homes. When I was a kid, we often passed Steuben County’s magnificent Italianate home that stood just past Exit 350 on I-69. I missed seeing it on my latest trip to Angola and learned that it’d been torn down in 2019. Just like schoolhouses, courthouses, and communications towers, Indiana’s old infirmaries need documented for posterity too. 

So do our drive-in theaters, our drive-in restaurants, and our old high school gyms. Old roads. Iron bridges. Elderly motels. Country churches. Carnegie Libraries. Your backyard is full of things to explore! If you’re a history fan like me, take pictures and write about them along the way. Just do it! As for me, I’m going to take my own advice and head out. I’ve got a couple places on my list I haven’t been to yet.