I’ve started to notice a pattern here: I keep showing up just in time. Not at the height of things, and not long after they’re gone, but in that narrow window when a place is still standing, still recognizable, and just beginning to slip away. Indiana’s old county homes seem especially prone to that timing, and that’s exactly how I found the old DeKalb County Home.
Continue reading “Indiana’s DeKalb County Home”
A while back, I shared a map of the tunnels under the oldest part of Ball State I created using a 1950s Sanborn fire insurance map. A few weeks later, I posted an updated map after a friend sent me an underground schematic from 1982. Several days ago, someone sent me the official map! I’m not going to post it here, but it appears as though mine was pretty accurate.
Continue reading “Someone sent me Ball State’s official tunnel map. The one I made was pretty accurate”
Delaware County boasts basketball cathedrals like the Muncie Fieldhouse and Ball Gymnasium, but its history thins out fast after a step outside the city. In fact, only one true survivor from Indiana’s golden age of hoops remains- the home of the Gaston Bulldogs. After years of trying to find someone to let us in, My friend Brett and I visited yesterday. We might have made it just in time. Here’s how it all unfolded, with some history to boot.
Continue reading “A glimpse inside the Gaston gym”
Yesterday, I posted about a building at 3604 East Jackson Street in Muncie that someone told me was an old schoolhouse. I had my doubts since I’d never come across it in years of digging through local history, but a fortunate tip from reader gregandbirds strongly suggested I may have been wrong.
Continue reading “The home I wrote about yesterday WAS an old schoolhouse, but I still don’t know much about it”
As much as I’ve learned about East-Central Indiana’s old schoolhouses, I don’t consider myself an expert. Experience has taught me otherwise! Just when I start to feel confident, some new detail comes along and humbles me. That happened about five years ago, when I was told the building at 3604 East Jackson Street in Muncie was once a schoolhouse. It’s a fascinating claim, but one I’m not convinced is true.
Continue reading “Someone said this is an old schoolhouse, but I’m skeptical”
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.
Continue reading “One last set of ten old gyms as they appeared in Sanborn Maps”
Most of Muncie’s outdoor warning sirens are bland, modern Federal Signal 2001-SRNs. Three, however, are different: they’re yellow Federal Signal Thunderbolts that date back to 1958. I’ve finally tracked all of them down, but the last example -perched at the old Riley Elementary School- has fallen silent. Its Cold War voice is broken.
Continue reading “I clinched Muncie’s Thunderbolt trifecta with unfortunate results”
Some buildings don’t really disappear. Instead, they just learn how to hold new secrets. Pendleton’s elementary school campus is one of those places. At a glance, it’s a tidy, familiar part of town, reshaped over decades to meet modern needs. If you look a little closer, though, the outline of something older begins to emerge: the roof of the old Pendleton High School gym.
Continue reading “The shell of the old Pendleton High School Gym is hiding in plain sight”
Back when I was in school at IPFW, I took every which way from my parents’ house in Muncie to my crappy apartment in Fort Wayne. I often passed through Petroleum on State Road 1. Once day, I wondered where the east-west crossroads went and passed a boulder marking the site of the old Petroleum school. I was in the area not long ago and went by a second time.
Continue reading “The Petroleum Panthers”
Late last year, I followed Green Street Road out of Albany toward Dunkirk and was stunned to find the old Green Street schoolhouse reduced to a heap of fallen bricks. In hindsight, the collapse shouldn’t have shocked me since the front gable had been clinging to life for years. Nevertheless, it set my mind spinning about other rural schoolhouses that might be teetering on the same edge. One of them was Niles Township’s old District 9 school, known at different times as Smith or Lowe. Thankfully, it’s still standing- at least for now.
Continue reading “Somehow, Smith schoolhouse still stands”