Be they Muffler Men, fiberglass Indians, or larger-than-life depictions of country stars like the late Dolly Parton, I’m a sucker for roadside statuary. Richmond, Indiana, has one of the most imposing examples I’ve encountered: standing guard at the entrance to Glen Miller Park is an eighteen-foot monument to the pioneer women who crossed the American wilderness, the Madonna of the Trail. It’s seventeen tons of pioneer mother, baby, and little boy, and you simply can’t miss it.

If I had a time machine, my sixteenth priority would be traveling back to the turn of the twentieth century to warn East-Central Indiana’s boosters about one thing: stop trying to build resorts around manmade lakes. They make great fodder for history nerds today, but mostly because they almost never worked out. Gas Lake near Yorktown failed. Knightstown Lake near Raysville failed. Then there was Morton Lake near Richmond. It failed too, but there’s some intriguing infrastructure left over. 

If you’ve ever driven U.S. 33 between Fort Wayne and Goshen, you may have noticed a cluster of log cabins tucked alongside a curve just southeast of tiny Benton. They’re easy to pass without much thought, but travelers were meant to stop a century ago. Together, they’re the old Log Cabin Inn, an early tourist court built to take advantage of one of America’s most important roads.

The interurban electric railway hasn’t carried passengers through central Indiana for more than eighty years. If you slow down, though, traces of it still hide in plain sight. One of the most prominent survivors is Hartford City’s old traction station at the southeast corner of South Jefferson and East Water Streets.

Back when my dad lived up north, we made the Fort Wayne-to-Goshen run on U.S. Route 33 like clockwork every other weekend. We’d roll through little towns like Kimmell without a second though, but what changed the day Dad caught wind of something you don’t see every day: the intersection of Lincoln and Hitler Streets. For a guy wired for history, the intersection was irresistible! Next thing we knew, we followed his curiosity and saw it for ourselves.

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.

I’m fascinated by the National Road- the early highway that connected Cumberland, Maryland, with Vandalia, Illinois, and blazed its way through East-Central Indiana in the 1820s¹. There’s no better resource to learn more about it than Jim Grey’s blog, Down the Road! I was scrolling through the archives over my morning crumpets when I read a comment that suggested there was an 1800s-era mile marker near Woodside Drive in Richmond. Curiosity took over: I had to find it for myself!

Yesterday was interesting. I drove my sister to a nearby Friends church for some photos, nearly got the car stuck in its snowy graveyard, and then detoured past the old Murphy’s Ford on the way home. I wanted to see what it looked like when everything was frozen, and I wasn’t disappointed!