Category Indiana

One last set of ten old gyms as they appeared in Sanborn Maps

Ted Shideler 3 Comments
Read time: 7 min.

Growing up in the heart of Hoosier Hysteria, it was probably inevitable that I’d fall for basketball. What I didn’t expect was how deeply I’d get hooked on the places it was played. Long after the final buzzer, I’m still thinking about balconies, locker rooms, and oddly shaped floors. Recently, I’ve been digging through old Sanborn Maps to trace how high school gyms were first built, how they evolved, and what those changes say about the communities that packed them. Here’s a little more of what turned up.

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The Golden Dome of MCL

Ted Shideler 11 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

In terms of restaurants, big names tend to crowd out the near-misses. Every once in a while, though, something surfaces that makes you stop and wonder how it ever slipped away. That’s exactly what happened when my friend Dylan stumbled across Golden Dome, a short-lived fried chicken concept from MCL. It seemed poised to be its next big thing! Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. 

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The Meetinghouse at Carthage

Ted Shideler 2 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

Not many people know this, but I’m a birthright Quaker. I haven’t regularly attended meeting since I was a kid, but I found myself unexpectedly drawn back to that part of my story a few years ago. My mom has an 1866 diary kept by our ancestor Mary Jane Edwards, and we set out to follow the trail she left behind. One of those places was Rush County’s old Carthage Friends Meetinghouse.

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Then and Now: Marion’s Five Points Mall

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 13 min.

Dead malls have become unlikely celebrities across Indiana and the Midwest. Departing national chains left behind huge concrete footprints that communities could never refill! Sadly, their empty storefronts are now photographed and debated almost as often as the courthouses and town squares that once anchored local life. In Marion, one mall sits in silence as it waits for a second act.

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Not just Muncie: MCLs are closing at an alarming rate

Ted Shideler 5 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

There are some stories you chase, and others that keep showing up on your plate whether you ordered them or not. Lately, MCL has been the latter. Locations are closing, answers are scarce, and a chain that’s unassumingly fed generations of Hoosiers now seems to be slipping away without much explanation.

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1.5 milestones on the old National Road

Ted Shideler 4 Comments
Read time: 4 min.

The history of the National Road -an early highway that connected Cumberland, Maryland, with Vandalia, Illinois, and blazed its way through East-Central Indiana in the 1820s- is fascinating. Along the route, travelers once relied on tombstone-shaped markers that recorded distances between towns and state lines. Many still stand in other states, but Indiana’s are few, if not far between. At least, they were.

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