The Toast has been an Anderson, Indiana, institution for seventy-five years. It’s one of those diners everyone seems to know even if they’ve never made it inside. Despite my own long history with the city, I’d somehow managed to miss it! That changed one recent morning when my Mom and I found ourselves in Anderson with breakfast on the brain. We each pulled up a chair, and here’s how it went.
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Imagine it’s the 1960s: you, me, and a handful of our department-store executive friends are scheming up a fast-food joint with a name that’s close to a golden-arched competitor without triggering a lawsuit. Why don’t we call it McBurger? That’s the name McCrory’s rolled out in Anderson and a handful of other cities in 1968. Some still remember it!
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You might not know them by name, but I’m sure you remember pizza robots, those animatronic avatars that danced and sang before a piping-hot pie arrived at your family’s table. They were loud, uncanny, and absolutely unforgettable! Unfortunately, we never had a ShowBiz Pizza where I grew up in Muncie. Just down the road, though, Anderson hosted one of its own for three glorious years in the early 1980s
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Every now and then, I start to feel a little too confident in my grasp of local history- at least right up until a stubborn detail comes along and humbles me. That’s exactly what happened recently while I was digging into the schoolhouses of eastern Madison County, Indiana. One unassuming building in the tiny hamlet of Gilman, in particular, reminded me that even familiar places can still hold a few surprises.
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America has a reputation for bulldozing the past, but plenty of buildings here get a second act. Some transformations are so seamless you’d never guess what came before, while others keep their history on full display. In North Anderson, a massive storage facility falls into the latter category- the 73,000-square-foot building1 spent thirty-seven years as a Kmart.
Continue reading “Not fooling anyone: this storage facility in Anderson used to be…”
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.
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I first heard of Mendon, Indiana, while I chased down a photo of its old T-shaped schoolhouse. The tiny community sits just a few miles south of Pendleton, tucked off State Road 9, and I worked it into a larger schoolhouse hunt that took me through several townships. When I finally rolled into town, I was met with a surprise- there was no school in sight! I parked in the cemetery, checked my bearings, and only then realized the building had recently been demolished. Even so, Mendon hasn’t lost all of its charm. For a history buff, the crossroads still has a few stories left to tell.
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This blog has always been about chasing down the places that spark my curiosity and finding out everything I can about them. Most recently, I’ve discovered that my daily commute from Muncie to Anderson is packed with sites to absorb! I’ve spotted several that made me reach for my phone and snap a quick photo, so here are seven hasty shots of buildings I haven’t written about yet.
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Airports are funny places. On one hand, you’ve got behemoths like Chicago O’Hare or Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, where hundreds of flights take off and land every day in a carefully choreographed frenzy. On the other, there’s your Uncle Clem easing his Cessna 172 onto a sod strip framed by a pair of cornfields. Somewhere in the middle lies a forgotten kind of airport like the one just southeast of Alexandria, Indiana. For most of its life, it went by the name Knotts Field1.
Continue reading “Where Beechcraft still beckons”
Yorktown-based Marsh Supermarkets entered the booming, burgeoning convenience store market back in 1966. Fast-forward forty years, and they’d built a network of 154 Village Pantries across Indiana and Ohio! Many of the oldest have found second or third lives as something new, and I try to snap a quick photo whenever I drive past one.
Continue reading “Another old Village Pantry in Anderson, spotted in the wild”