Last month, I wrote about my friend Brett and our hunt for the old Otter Creek High School in Vigo County. After some virtual sleuthing and a little stubborn curiosity, we finally found it- or at least what was left: a lonely old gym and a few attached classrooms standing against the odds. By now, even those remnants are probably gone.
I mention my buddy Brett from time to time. He’s the mastermind behind Hoosier Gym Journey, a quest to visit all 400+ current high school gyms in Indiana, along with those that remain from bygone eras. When Brett asked me to help him find Otter Creek, I had no idea where the original high school stood. Fortunately, a 1956 article in the Terre Haute Tribune noted that a new Otter Creek Elementary would face U.S. 41 on a twenty-seven-acre site, just two blocks south of the existing school on Park Street1. It didn’t take long to locate the site of the old school at the corner of Linn Avenue and North Sander Street.
Brett and I started digging. Terre Haute’s online newspaper archive doesn’t stretch back far enough to tell us when the high school first opened, but the Vigo County assessor’s records list the gym as dating to 19282. The entire property was auctioned off in 19643, and the school itself appears to have been torn down in 19674.
As we dug deeper into the story of the old Otter Creek gym, Brett stumbled across a few social media posts hinting that it, too, was about to come down. That sent me back to the Vigo County assessor’s database, where I realized that the property was owned by the Vigo County Board of Commissioners5.
Brett crisscrosses Indiana documenting old high school gyms, and he already had a President’s Day trip to the area on his calendar. If the Otter Creek gym was truly on borrowed time, he hoped to at least photograph the exterior or, in a perfect world, step inside one last time before it vanished. We reached out to the commissioners’ administrative assistant to ask about access, but our email disappeared into the void.
Brett made the trip as planned, and I hated that my schedule kept me from tagging along. Still, he reached North Terre Haute just in time: as you can see in his photos, the wrecking crews were already at work! The old gym, long derelict after periods under the ownership of the Wabash Valley Crusaders for Christ and later the Light House Mission6, was finally coming down. Maybe it had been fading for years, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch another piece of local history -and basketball heritage- disappear.
There’s something fitting, I guess, about the way this one ended. Brett and I didn’t uncover Otter Creek in time to save it, not that we could anyway. We didn’t get a tour. We didn’t even get a reply to our email. What we did get was proof that it mattered, though- enough to chase it down, enough to document it, and enough for Brett to pass it on a cold February morning and watch the last walls fall.
That’s the work of projects like Brett’s Hoosier Gym Journey– and, in a way, of Hiding in Plain Sight, too. Not every building can be preserved. Not every gym can become the next Hoosier shrine, either. Still, every one of them deserves to be remembered. The old Otter Creek gym might be gone now, but it’s not entirely lost. Somewhere, in a shoebox of old yearbooks or in the memory of someone who once hit a game-winning shot under those lights, Otter Creek High School still stands.
Sources Cited
1 Otter Creek Plans School (1956, February 17). The Terre Haute Tribune. p. 13.
2 Parcel 84-02-36-302-008.000-013 (2025). Office of the Assessor. Vigo County [Terre Haute]. Web. Retrieved January 21, 2026.
3 Legal Notices (1964, July 30). The Terre Haute Tribune. p. 25.
4 Legal Notices (1967, October 20). The Terre Haute Tribune. p. 16.
5 (See footnote 2).
6 (See footnote 2).
Thanks for euologizing this building. I looked it up the last time you posted about it. I considered taking a shot at acquiring it, although I would not have been fast enough either. I work for an organization that often repurposes empty schools into housing, and structures like this always pique my interest from both a historical perspective but also in the opportunity to save them for reuse in a second (or third or fourth) life.
You may have the coolest job ever. And, yeah, if Brett had waited one more day he’d have found nothing but rubble.
That gym looked to be of a unusual design, with that horseshoe-like surround.
It was. I bet they were vocational classrooms like at the Muncie Fieldhouse, which is much larger with space for the rooms underneath the seating bowl.