A few years back, I found myself driving through Anderson when I couldn’t resist pulling over at the long-shuttered Mounds Mall. At the time, rumors swirled that the place might make a comeback. Years have passed, though, and those plans never left the drawing board. Today, Sears -and the rest of the mall- remains frozen in time, empty and crumbling. It’s a ghost of a retail empire that once was.
Developed by Melvin Simon & Associates, Mounds Mall was Indiana’s second fully enclosed shopping center after Washington Square in Evansville. Anchors H.P. Wasson and Montgomery Ward opened in November 1964, and the rest of the mall came online in 19651. As planned, Ward’s featured 85,000 square feet of gross area with 35,000 square feet dedicated to sales, an eight-bay automotive service center, and an area set aside for outdoor and seasonal goods2.
The arrival of the new superstore saw the closure of Anderson’s extant Montgomery Ward, which had been established at 1327 Meridian Street downtown in 1931. “Our decision to relocate our present store was made with several factors in mind,” said Russell Bygel, vice president of Montgomery Ward. “We have been greatly impressed with the continual growth and potential growth of Anderson and the surrounding area, and we particularly favored the location and design proposed for the center3.”
The new Montgomery Ward at Mounds Mall was one of twenty-five opened by the company in 19644. In 1980, it was selected as a candidate for conversion to the new Jefferson Ward concept, which featured more self-service departments and a central checkout location. “We sincerely feel that this new type of promotional department store created by Montgomery Ward will be very popular with our customers in Anderson,” store manager Paul Welch remarked5.
“We will be giving them the advantage of self-service and centralized checkout along with all the services they have been accustomed to at Montgomery Ward. We have been a part of Anderson for the past 50 years and look forward to a long and lasting relationship with the people of Anderson6,” Welch added.
Unfortunately, the arrangement wasn’t to last. On September 3, 1981, Montgomery Ward announced its store at Mounds Mall would close at the end of business on Christmas Eve. “We are making this move for the economic reasons,” said district manager Robert Baker. “We have been unable to make a satisfactory return on investment with this store7.”
Ward’s loss turned into Sears’ big break. After four years of hunting for a modern home, including a possible new mall on 53rd Street8, Sears finally left its longtime downtown store behind and moved into the vacant Montgomery Ward space in 1982. “It’s been a long dry spell, but we finally made it,” proclaimed Sears store manager Steve Murphy. “We’ve had a decline in sales the last couple of years,” he continued, “but we expect that moving to the new location should show a fairly good increase in sales9.”
With Sears joining a lineup that already featured J.C. Penney, Meis, Weiler, and Hoyt Wright, many believed the mall had finally found its spark again10. The new addition was hailed as the boost Mounds Mall needed to keep shoppers from drifting south to Castleton and Indianapolis- a trend that, surprisingly, had been chipping away at local business since the early 1980s.
Officials also pinned their hopes on Sears to steady the ship, believing its arrival would convince smaller retailers to stick around at the mall instead of packing up for greener pastures11. The department store’s reputation as a national anchor brought with it an air of stability and prestige, the kind of boost local leaders hoped would breathe new life into the property.
All told, Sears enjoyed a thirty-year run at Mounds Mall before shutting its doors in 2012 after a lackluster holiday season in 201112. Unlike Montgomery Ward’s exit decades earlier, though, no retailer rushed to claim the cavernous space. Aside from the occasional event, the building sat quietly. Its emptiness foreshadowed the mall’s own closure in 2018.
Of course, we all know how the story ended for Sears. Once a titan of American retail with catalogs found in nearly every home and stores that anchored countless downtowns and malls across the country, the company that once defined shopping itself couldn’t withstand the tidal shift of the digital age. By the time the Anderson store closed in 2012, Sears was already in steep decline, its glory days long behind.
In 2021, a glimmer of hope flickered for Mounds Mall when a new owner stepped forward with ambitious plans to breathe life back into the property, and envisioned the former Montgomery Ward and Sears reborn as a sprawling event center13. Four years later, though, that spark has faded. The grand reopening never came, and time has continued its quiet work of decay. Today, Mounds Mall and its former Sears store wait in silence, its future as uncertain as ever. Or maybe it’s sadly certain. I can’t see Mounds Mall ever reopening again.
Sources Cited
1 New Store To Employ 250 People (1964, November 12). The Anderson Herald. p. 7.
2 Ward, Wasson To Be In New ‘Mall Shopping Center’ (1963, December 4). The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 1.
3 (See footnote 2).
4 Montgomery Ward Officials Visit City (1964, November 11). The Anderson Herald. p. 13.
5 Local Wards chosen for new store concept (1980, November 23). The Anderson Herald. p. 39.
6 (see footnote 5).
7 Montgomery Ward Inventory Liquidation Sale (1981, October 28). The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 15.
8 Walter Clements, C. (1982, August 19). Sears to move into mall. The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 1.
9 Kirby, R. (1982, August 19). The Anderson Herald. p. 1.
10 (See footnote 8).
11 (See footnote 8).
12 Palmer, D. (2012, April 29). Anderson says its final goodbye to Sears. The Anderson Herald Bulletin. Web. Retrieved October 20, 2025.
13 Mounds Mall Owner Shoots for 2023 Reopening (2021, June 17). Inside Indiana Business [Indianapolis]. Web. Retrieved October 20, 2025.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with a lot of these Dead Malls. I feel that location is going to matter the most–the ones that are inconveniently positioned and on the hinterlands are going to have a tougher time than those centrally located.
We are seeing this happen with the Lloyd Center Mall in Portland. It’s an early one (circa 1960) that has lost its original reason for existence as the big anchors decamped. (There are bigger, newer malls further out that still function like the malls of old.) But the Lloyd District is a weird “second suburban-style downtown” that’s barely a mile from the actual Downtown, so it’s centrally located and has great access via freeways and MAX Light Rail. Now it’s being reused by small, independent retailers that could never have afforded the rent during the mall’s prime days, and it’s become an incubator. The long-term question of the mall’s future is still in limbo (its central location makes redevelopment desirable), but right now it’s going through an interesting phase.
Very interesting.
My uneducated speculation is that the super-regional malls will continue to thrive to the detriment of those that once located around the suburban circle. Anderson will become a suburb of Indianapolis within the next twenty years, but it’s too late to save the Mounds Mall. It opened just as a state road bypass of the town came on the scene, but now an interstate rules the area. The city was destroyed when General Motors moved out, and anything far from I-69 is just asking for trouble.
Yeah, size is going to matter a lot as well. The older malls (60’s and 70’s) are going to have a tougher go than the bigger malls that came on the scene in the 1980’s. I saw this attrition back in Connecticut, where those older malls either had to adapt (i.e. get bigger and also enclose the halls if they were open air), convert to big box hubs, or wither away. My hometown mall, an anemic sized circa 1972 mall without any real anchors (it was always a third-tier grocery and Kmart) got plowed down by 2000 and converted to a big box center. I’ll always have fond memories of that dinky mall and the failed experiment in “urban renewal”, but it was not going to survive compared to the bigger, better malls around it.
I find it fascinating that Simon built a mall in Anderson before they built one in Indianapolis.
I think the 1980-82 recession (which hurried along GMs retrenching) was the beginning of the end of Anderson as an area for thriving retail.
Another interesting story about my former hometown and birthplace. I Have a few of Montgomery Wards at Meridian, and more at the Mall. The downtown Sears was were we bought everything when I was first married. My wife worked there for a short while. I miss the old Anderson. It will never be back.
Unfortunately, I think you’re right.