I can’t believe I missed it, but Saturday, September 5th, marked Hiding in Plain Sight’s fourth birthday. Here I was yammering on about an old playground when we should have been eating cupcakes together! Oh well. As the child of divorced parents, I’m used to celebrating special occasions a day or two after the fact. Better late than never!
It’s hard to believe four years have passed since Hiding in Plain Sight went online on September 5, 2022. I didn’t have a grand plan, a content strategy, a name, or any expectation that people would read it. I just had a growing collection of posts I’d written about schoolhouses, courthouses, and tobacco pipes without a unified place to put them. I figured I’d publish them all, write about whatever caught my attention, hope for some views, and see what happened.
Apparently, what happened was 1,466 posts and nearly a million views. I’ve published something every single day since I started, with one embarrassing exception early on when I simply forgot. Those posts add up to 1,171,265 words, a number that’s hard for me to comprehend. It’s the equivalent of a shelf full of books, but I don’t know of any publisher who would release a twelve-volume encyclopedia about one-room schoolhouses, dead malls, artesian wells, tornado sirens, county homes, old gyms, Revolutionary War Patriots, and AT&T Long Line towers! In a way, I guess I have.
Then come the sources. There are thousands, all cited, from old newspapers, county histories, government records, maps, directories, photographs, property records, books, reports, archival collections, and all kinds of other material that I’ve managed to get my paws on over the years. I can spend dozens of uninterrupted hours scrolling through them to confirm some tiny detail three people care about, but it’s taken me three weeks to re-watch two-thirds of A League of Their Own.
Four years in, I’m happy to say that Hiding in Plain Sight has grown into a small repository of East-Central Indiana history, just not the history that traditionally winds up on plaques or in museums. I’m interested in the places people congregated and the ones we drive past without noticing. The buildings and places I cover might seem trivial to some, but this blog has connected me with enough historians, librarians, archivists, preservationists, property owners, public officials, collectors, distant relatives, and regular readers to know that I’m not alone in enjoying learning about them.
I have no idea what Hiding in Plain Sight will look like four years from now. I didn’t expect it to become what it is today! There are still hundreds of schoolhouses I haven’t visited, countless buildings I know nothing about, wells I haven’t found, malls that haven’t quite died yet, sirens I haven’t seen in action, and other historical rabbit holes waiting for me to tumble into them. That’s probably enough to keep me busy for a while.
For now, though, I want to say thank you. Thanks for reading, commenting, sharing, sending tips, digging through your photo albums, telling me stories, pointing me toward places I never knew existed, and occasionally even correcting me. You’ve helped turn a hobby into an obsession that’s expanded more than I imagined. Four years, a million words, thousands of sources, and, yes, that one forgotten day in September 2022…it’s not bad for something I started when I suddenly had a new job with the weekends off.
At any rate, happy belated birthday, blog! I’m sorry I forgot.
