Back in March, I published a post called “One last trip to the Muncie Mall.” As it turns out, I’m a liar! Last week, I wanted to see how the inside’s holding up now that demolition has started on the exterior. The results were not surprising. 

If you’re a fan of roadside architecture and vintage signage, behold this monstrosity just west of New Castle’s Raintree Hotel. Beneath all that awkward paneling and decades of modifications, guess what I think is hiding underneath: my money’s on the framework of one of Holiday Inn’s landmark Great Signs. Those towering neon beacons were icons of the American highway! 

Not long ago, I wrote about a drive through Delaware County with Grandma, Mom, and Aunt Jan that recreated the 2002 trip that turned me into a full-blown schoolhouse freak. Just like Mom did twenty-four years earlier, I documented the schools we passed with her Sony Mavica FD-75, a gloriously obsolete digital camera that stored its photos on floppy disks. Naturally, I also snapped backup shots with my iPhone. Here they are.

Most people drive past the McDonald’s at Charles and Madison in Muncie without giving it a second thought. After all, it’s just another fast-food restaurant. Look just to the left, though, and you’ll find one of Indiana’s most remarkable surviving roadside landmarks: a giant neon sign from 1958 featuring a grinning mascot with a hamburger-shaped head! Long before Ronald McDonald and supersized meals, this downtown corner marked the arrival of a fast-food revolution in Muncie.

I’m normally pretty good at researching old common schoolhouses, but those operated by religious organizations tend to stymie me. Their histories rarely show up in the records I rely on, and the paper trail often fades fast. That was the case with the old New Garden Academy a mile south of Fountain City! I spun my wheels for a while before an unexpected breakthrough in the form of an obscure book tucked away in my mom’s office.

As an unincorporated village in rural Tipton County away from nearly every highway, Curtisville is the kind of place you don’t venture to unless you’re really looking for stuff. As it happened, I was! A stray social media post mentioned an old gym in town, which was enough to send me digging. It took some effort to track down, but once I did, parts of a story started to come into focus.

Williamsburg, Indiana, is an unincorporated community platted in 1830. Situated around US-35 and the old Centerville Road, it’s about twelve miles northwest of the heart of downtown Richmond. I’ve passed the old Green Township school there countless times, but never got a chance to explore it until just recently. What a treasure! I’m glad I did. 

Almost exactly a year ago, I was wandering through Huntington County when I stumbled past the old Belleville schoolhouse north of Warren. As I researched, I read a Facebook post I can no longer find that asserted it was Huntington County’s last old schoolhouse! I took that as a personal challenge to find more, and wound up with eight. Here they are. 

Delaware County’s Cammack schoolhouse carries a lingering mystery that traces back to an 1887 plat map. Regardless of who you ask, it seems, conventional wisdom insists that the schoolhouse originally stood at the end of Jackson Street, just west of Yorktown-Gaston Pike. I never bought it myself, but that interpretation hardened into “fact” simply because people kept repeating what they thought the map showed. Today, I’d like to yammer on with proof that the old schoolhouse never stood there. I apologize in advance for my stridency.