Awesome: Ten year old boy from Santa Claus, Indiana, catches a huge catfish with his bare hands. Are you more surprised by a ten year old noodler with the active support of his mom or that we have a town named Santa Claus?

I need to get outside today. Rachel and I are going to take a walk this morning, then I’m going to doing some berry picking. Also, I’ve been thinking about the Lost River lately so I think I’ll visit the Orangeville Rise and the Wesley Chapel Gulf today.

Today I learned that the East Fork of the White River (which runs south of town) is called Aankwaahsakwa Siipiiwi by the Miami people. This translates to “Driftwood River”–which is a far better name that East Fork of the White River!

Roadside shrine near Medora, IN

One of the prettiest dogwoods I’ve ever seen, across the street from the credit union.

Cherry blossoms are nice, for sure, but have you ever seen a redbud luminous on a karst hillside?

We’re on the edge of most winter storms here. In Indiana, winter storms tend to include all of northern Indiana down to Indianapolis. Often they’ll hit Bloomington–only sometimes Bedford. If the Midwest is characterized by winter storms, we’re barely Midwestern. We’re expecting 1-3" tonight.

I’ve accepted an invitation to join the finance committee of my local community foundation in January. Can’t be much of a localist without putting in some practice.

It’s still very hot but the season is shifting: I’m seeing more spider webs.

Today’s walk to Murray woods.

After the recent rain, there’s a lot of water rushing out of Donaldson Cave at Spring Mill State Park. You might call it chthonic water. (Ha ha?)

One benefit of living in a small town: parades with fire trucks and classic cars and tractors and the high school marching band and Shriners.

Really interesting presentation this evening at the Lawrence County Museum about the history of newspaper printing—including physical copies of papers from the past few hundred years.

As with all opinions that don’t matter, I hold firmly to the idea that the Midwest consists of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. It seems to me that the historical roots of the Midwest lie in the Old Northwest Territory (named because it was northwest of the Ohio River), which consisted of the states named above plus a piece of Minnesota.

The Midwest is also characterized by industrial centers–Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee. The further you get from those classic industrial cities the less Midwestern you are. Honestly, here in southern Indiana we’re more of a border region between the Midwest and the South.

But you know what’s even better than state line and arbitrary region names? Watersheds. It grounds our sense of geography in something more real than political boundaries. In this post, Todd writes about one way to do that. If we use his system of naming regions after river watersheds, I live in the nation of Ohio, state of Wabash, county of Patoka-White, and city of East Fork White.

Rachel and I are now lifetime members of our county’s historical society. This is not step one of my Grand Plan to Change the World. It is, however, step one in connecting with my community, warts and all. Localism doesn’t mean much if it’s all just in your head.

We’re shifting to late summer and that means the buzzing drone of annual cicadas. Nothing sounds more like summer than that.

I found out this week that my hometown has a unique piece of furniture: the Bedford pie safe. It is unique in being three panels wide instead of two. Research by the local historical society found that they were built by a cabinetmaker named John Reath (1817-1898). I’d love to see one in person!

I visited Corydon—Indiana’s original state capital—for the first time on Friday. It was the capital from the time it became a state in 1816 until Indianapolis was built (specifically for the purpose of being the capital city) in 1825.

This building housed both wings of the state legislature and the Supreme Court:

The Indiana constitution was debated and drafted in part under this elm, because the building was too hot in June. The tree died about a century ago and they preserved its trunk in this monument. All of Indiana’s county courts have a gavel carved from this elm and the original constitution is stored in a box made from its wood:

The Indiana constitution was signed on this desk:

On a solo drive through southern Indiana today. First stops: the Medora brick factory and the Medora covered bridge (longest in the US).

I’m feeling the itch to go on another southern Indiana day-long road trip. Some previous trips:

• July 2022 visit to Geode Grotto. Also visited Jug Rock and Hindostan Falls on the same day.
• I never properly documented this one, but I went on a long trip from New Harmony to Troy in August 2023. Pictures here and here. I wish I had documented it better at the time. It was a really good day. Apart from visiting New Harmony and Christ of the Ohio, I visited the grave of a gypsy queen in Evansville, explored a Catholic cemetery, drove the Ohio River Scenic Byway, and visited the Monte Cassino Shrine.
• Ancestor grave visiting in October 2023

I note with some disappointment that a few new businesses in my town are called Star City [etc]. When I was growing up, it seemed like every other business was Stone City [etc]. That was, of course, because of the local limestone industry. (We are, for good reason, the self-proclaimed Limestone Capital of the World.) The industry still exists but it is a shadow of its former self, for various reasons. Now businesses seem to be turning to the mascot of our high school for their naming. Is it a big deal? No, but it does represent a fading and forgetting.

It’s always sad and yet predictable when small towns and nonprofits are victims of fraud. And it’s almost always the same story: an understaffed entity with no internal controls. In this case, a small town in the area had $71k stolen through fraud by the clerk-treasurer. (Actually, just read the State Board of Accounts report linked at the bottom of the article. The article itself is not particularly well written.)

My point in posting this is to say that if you are involved with a small nonprofit (which are particularly vulnerable entities), please make sure there are good controls in place. If the same person is recording deposits in the software, making the deposits to the bank, and performing the bank reconciliations, the entity is exposing itself to serious risk. Even with a small staff, there can be separation of duties.

And, of course, fraud can still happen to an entity with good internal controls. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But some basic, sound procedures would prevent most of what I’ve seen over the years.

Remember the weird post in the woods near my house? Well there’s a new development. Now there’s a fairy Barbie doll set into the ground just a few feet away.

What’s going on here? No idea, but I delight in the strangeness. And it doesn’t hurt that I’m watching X-Files right now.

Came across a guy in the woods walking his pit bull.

“Out looking for mushrooms?”, he asks.

“A little, but I’m mostly looking for wildflowers. They’re so beautiful this time of year.”

“Hell yeah they are!”

I did not expect that response but a guy who will “hell yeah” wildflowers is my kind of guy.

Trillium on a moss-covered rock

I’ve lived in different areas of Lawrence County for my entire life–but everything started in one particular town, Springville. That’s where my maternal grandparents lived their adult lives. Bud (real name Clarence but universally known as Bud) and Alta (pronounced AL-tee) were both born in the Kentucky counties of Wayne and Pulaski, respectively, but their families moved to the area for the limestone jobs. I plan to write more about them but first I’m working on getting the chronology of their early lives straight. In the meantime, suffice it to say that Springville is where their children were born and it is the place of my earliest memories.

Two buildings come to mind today.

First is the Trinity Pentecost Mission. (The Holiness people, bless them, weren’t always clear that their churches were Pentecostal, not Pentecost.)

Grandpa helped build this church and served as Sunday School Superintendent for thirty years. I have the bell he used on those Sunday mornings.

It’s possible that my great-grandpa was a preacher at this church but that is unconfirmed. I’m waiting to hear back from my uncle to see if he knows anything about that.

My earliest memories at this church:

• Stacking hymnals up to make buildings for the action figures and cars I brought with me.
• Dozing under the pews while people sang and danced and waved their arms.
• Listening in rapt amazement as a preacher (not the pastor) described what would happen in the end times. I vaguely remember speaking up during the sermon and saying something like “really?” and the preacher responding in the affirmative.
• Hearing the strange—almost distressing—way Brother Chet, the barrel-chested pastor, would catch his breath as he preached. Holiness preachers don’t talk, they yell. A preacher who didn’t yell for 90% of his sermon was a rarity. So it wasn’t that Chet was unusual in volume, only in the way he sucked in oxygen at the end of a sentence like a man having a heart attack.
• The painting of damned souls dropping off a cliff into Hell, with a caption along the lines of “Eternity. How long?” I may visit the church again sometime just to get a picture of that painting.

Second is Springville Grocery. A picture as it is now:

My aunt started this store many years ago. Maybe in the 70s? I remember it especially from the time when my grandparents moved from their little house in which my mom and aunts and uncles grew up to a trailer on the lot next to the grocery store. My guess is that my aunt owned that lot and helped my grandparents move there so they would be close by.

I stayed with my grandparents a lot during childhood so I remember walking over to the store with a handful of pennies and nickels for candy. I don’t really have many specific memories about the store—just that it was a fixture and landmark during my childhood.

I’m very glad to see that it seems to have taken on new life. I hadn’t been there in many years until very recently and they’ve added booths and hot breakfast. It looks like the sort of place the local retirees might gather. And, more relevant to us, they have become Springville’s source for locally raised meat and dairy products. Seeing my aunt’s store turn into a market supporting local agriculture is gratifying.

Any ideas what this might be?

The east fork of the White River has a lot of fog and ice this morning.

Some day trips I want to make in 2024:

• Prophetstown state park in Lafayette
• Turkey Run and Clifty Falls state parks, because they’re always worth visiting
• In 2023 I made a trip through New Harmony and then east along the Ohio River to Troy. This year I’d like to start at the other end of the Ohio and move west back to the center.
• Visit some of the notable trees in Magnificent Trees of Indiana
• More cemeteries, of course.

For various reasons, I didn’t spend as much time in the woods as I would have wished in 2023. I hope that will change in 2024. I’ve picked up my state park pass at the Spring Mill gatehouse in preparation.

There’s a tiny town an hour or so away called Pumpkin Center—universally pronounced “Punkin Center.” I had occasion to search the name this week and came across this 1972 NYT story on the town. At this point I believe it’s been entirely taken over by an Amish settlement.

I did some grave visitation today ahead of Allhallowtide. I’ll be busy on the actual days and I have some local graves to visit this weekend, so today seemed like a good day for the not-so-local graves. Today’s route:

What an absolutely beautiful day for a drive in the hills around Patoka Lake. The fall colors were delightful. A corner of Patoka Lake:

I mentioned recently that I’ve been thinking about my dad’s side of the family recently. I never knew them well, for reasons that are obvious from that post. Some bad stuff came through that family line and a lot of my recent spiritual practice has been working toward understanding and integrating that pain and hopefully transforming it.

It turns out that generations worth of my dad’s family are in two cemeteries: Crystal Community Cemetery and Bethany Union Chapel Cemetery. (The Find a Grave website has been invaluable, by the way.)

Four generations worth of my paternal grandfather’s side are in Crystal Community Cemetery, all the way back to my great-great-great grandfather (b. 1834) who was a private in the Union Army in the Civil War. I have a letter from him that has been passed down the generations. (It’s at the print shop being scanned right now but I’ll post a picture when I get it back.)

Three generations worth of my paternal grandmother’s side are in Bethany Union Chapel Cemetery. The oldest ancestor there was born in 1872 but there are others in nearby cemeteries which I did not have time to visit today. Another time, for sure.

When I got to Crystal Community Cemetery, I was tempted to stand in the middle of it and say, “okay, y’all, who started this shit?” But I didn’t. I did talk to them all, particularly my paternal grandfather who I know did some bad stuff. I was very honest with him about my anger about what he did to my father.

I was honest with my folks in both cemeteries, actually. But I also told them that I and my family are doing well, despite it all. Obviously I still have some things to work through (else why am I traveling miles to gripe at my dead grandpa) but, on the whole, the wounds are closing and I have decided to act in the role of healer, not victim.

Michael Bogdanffy-kriegh—who is always worth reading!—has a good post today on the impact of some recent reading on his exercise patterns. I wanted to highlight one part to make a point somewhat unrelated to his own:

I have decided to focus on getting out of the house and going for walks (mind, body, earth, sometimes community) and winding up at local coffee shops, where I can have direct human-to-human contact (definitely community). Even if that contact is superficial banter with a barista whose name I know and who knows mine, it’s better than the social media app stand-ins we are plagued with. Even if I know no one, and talk to no-one, I am in a space alive with people interacting analog fashion. So that’s it, the coffee shops are my analog version of social media apps. They are way more satisfying.

This sounds lovely and it’s something I would like to do. However, we have a problem in my little town when it comes to walkability or even bikeability.

Take a look at this street map. The first thing you need to know is that Highway 37, the main highway on the west of the map, was built as a new terrain road in the seventies. The old highway 37 had a different route. My understanding of the development of that route through Bedford—which has been confirmed by three helpful posts 1 2 3 by Jim Grey—is as follows:

• Old Highway 37 came south out of Bloomington through Harrodsburg and Needmore into Oolitic.
• It continued south out of Oolitic on what is now Oolitic Road into Bedford on what is now Lincoln Avenue/L Street.
• It continued through Bedford on Lincoln until it came to downtown, at which point it jogged down to O Street/Washington Avenue and left town.

You can see these streets on the map above by looking for the largest north/south streets—and notice that they pass straight through the middle of town. I will say I’m a little surprised that it left town by way of Washington Avenue instead of Mitchell Road but Jim Grey has done a lot more research than I have so I’ll take his word for it. But, in any case, that’s beside the point for now.

You can see from the street map that the streets are clustered around those north-south routes and downtown. Walking and biking—I can say from a lot of experience—is pretty easy around that cluster of streets, so long as you understand that Bedford drivers are not overly concerned about pedestrians and are almost oblivious to cyclists.

Then came the seventies. Much as I love that decade for its movies and music, it created a real problem for Bedford with the building of “new” Highway 37.

Snip of INDOT highway map for 1970, showing the old highway taking the route described above:

And then a snip of the INDOT highway map for 1980, showing “new” Highway 37 passing just to the west of the bulk of the town:

This is why you see in the street map at the beginning of this post that there are three legs extending from the heart of Bedford to “new” Highway 37, i.e., 5th Street, Williams Boulevard, and 16th Street. Because of their connection to Highway 37, these three streets have been the site of most of the development efforts for the last forty years (apart from an effort by Mayor Shawna Girgis a few years ago to revitalize downtown, which did some real, if temporary, good).

And so, with the building of the new highway, downtown withered. Bedford was distended toward the new highway to the west and no subsequent, large-scale development efforts were made to build infrastructure to network and incorporate those roads. Today this means that, starting from downtown (where I live), there is not a network of quieter, safer secondary roads to get to the more developed west side of Bedford on foot or bicycle.

Starbucks is on 16th Street near the highway. Even with the drive-through a shambolic disaster, it stays very busy. There have been other efforts to open local coffee shop competitors but they haven’t lasted—partly because they were downtown and partly because they didn’t have drive-throughs (this is Rachel’s theory and I think she’s right).

It’s not news that cities have been designed for most of the twentieth and twenty-first century around cars. It’s obvious in my town that little attention has been paid to the movement of pedestrians and cyclists through the town. It’s also obvious that the planners for “new” Highway 37 in the sixties and seventies had little regard for what impact the highway would have for the pattern of life in the towns on the route. (And no regard whatsoever, I’m sure, for nonhuman life when they built it as a totally new road.)

So, yeah, I have no new insights here. Just an illustration of how short-sighted planners, who care only about economic impact and disregard human and nonhuman needs for movement, can cause everything from inconveniences to genuine problems, cascading across generations.

View of the Ohio River at Troy, Indiana and the magnificent Christ of the Ohio statue overlooking the river.

On the banks of the Wabash. (Near the Atheneum in New Harmony.)

Another good documentary on New Harmony, produced by Indiana University. This one gives more information about the Harmonists, a community of apocalyptic Lutherans. They first established the settlement on the Wabash but, after ten years, sold it to Robert Owen and moved back to Pennsylvania.

Good video about the remarkable Robert Owen, textile manufacturer, co-operative socialist, and founder of the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana—which I’ll be visiting on Wednesday.

Grist mill at Spring Mill State Park. It’s our local state park and it’s easy to forget how beautiful a place it is.

Once I get this next big batch of work to the auditors, I think I’ll take a day off. I want to plan a solo, local, day-long road trip. A combination of sites from Roadside America, historic cemeteries, and sites from this video (the narrator isn’t the best, bless him, but his videos are useful).

At Breckinridge Cemetery on the north side of Bedford, IN, is a monument to the unidentified Civil War dead at nearby Camp Lawrence.

The text of the monument is as follows:

CAMP LAWRENCE

1861-1865

Was used as an Union training camp and a Confederate prisoner of war interment (sic) camp. The camp was located southeast of this cemetery near the railroad.

Buried on this site are the remains of 25 Confederate prisoners of war and 7 Union soldiers who died at Camp Lawrence during the Civil War whose names are known but to God.

Spending the evening at a DIY music festival, listening to a bunch of local folk musicians. The cicadas are playing a set while the humans set up for their next performance.

Neighborhood lions, carved in limestone.

Recording taken by me on the morning of August 8, 2020, at the Canyon Forest Nature Preserve. Listening to the wood thrush’s song echoing through the forest was a beautiful moment that still comes to mind now and then.

It’s “Limestone Month” here in Bedford and this morning Rachel and I went on a tour of Green Hill Cemetery, the large cemetery in town that also has the most notable monuments and locally carved limestone folk art.

The tour guide was engaging and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately he was an old guy with a bad foot walking with a cane. And he can’t get volunteers to help. And there’s not enough money to cover the high costs of restoration and maintenance. And the number of available burial plots is decreasing and likewise their prospects for long-term revenue stream.

So the situation is not good. There were complaints about how people are less engaged with cemeteries now, buying fewer plots (presumably due to the rising popularity of cremation) and visiting the dead less regularly.

There are important things that could be lost if the trend continues, like historical knowledge and local, totally unique works of art. At the same time, I do not plan to be buried in the traditional manner; I would like some sort of green burial if local regulations are enlightened enough at the time of my death. Preferably I would be left atop a hill sacred to a local deity and consumed by crows. Barring that, at least no vault and no embalming.

So while I believe mainstream American burial customs reflect certain unhelpful beliefs and should be modified, I would not want to see Green Hill Cemetery fall into ruin. I don’t know what the answer is. Some cultures leave people buried for a period of time and then (once the memory of the person has faded over a few decades) inter the bones in a charnel house. This at least maintains the character of the land as a place of the dead without locking it up for the sake of long-forgotten souls who happened to live in an era of strong property rights.

Part of the problem they’re having is with maintenance of the monuments—precisely because they exist outside, in the weather and on shifting earth. Preserving them in a museum would be much easier. And, fascinating as some of the monuments may be, how many of them are simply the vanity of wealthy men etched in stone?

Part of me wants to volunteer to help and part of me wants the whole, unsustainable system to be replaced by something better.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of pictures of local limestone sculpture lately but I’ve been trying to appreciate some of the unique features of my hometown. Here are some replicas of the Moai from Easter Island.

Xenophobia plus bad grammar

Thanks to @readerjohn for passing on this article about an 80-ton limestone carving of Washington crossing the Delaware. Turns out it was a project initiated in 1974 by Merle Edington, a member of my hometown’s Chamber of Commerce. The carver was Frank Arena, who was retired and 76 years old at the time. Click through the link above for a picture.

More about Frank Arena: He was born in Brooklyn and moved to Bedford with his Italian immigrant father Frank Sr. One of Frank Jr’s first jobs was to help his father carve the columns of Bedford’s Masonic Temple:

Frank died in 2001 at age 102, having lived across three centuries. His grave is marked by a monument topped by a hat. “Whenever you saw him, he had that hat on. He carved stone in it. He went to church in it. He was always in that hat,” recalls Gene Abel (no known relation), the caretaker of Green Hill Cemetery.

Monuments at Beech Grove Cemetery are not quite as impressive as at Green Hill. Still, a few nice ones. Lots of trees and obelisks. A few lambs. The most unusual monument in Beech Grove is the basketball, which I discussed elsewhere.

My town is the self-proclaimed limestone capital of the world—and despite it being very chamber of commerce, there is some truth to the phrase. At the height of the industry seventy five years ago, there were some truly talented carvers, as you can see from the work in Green Hill Cemetery.

Chicken of the Woods. Spring Mill State Park.

Rachel and I took a quick walk in Murray Forest at lunch today. We saw a box turtle and both a pileated and red-headed woodpecker.

We also saw jack-in-the-pulpit, fire pink, and trillium. The main reason we went today, though, was American columbo (frasera caroliniensis). At some point this morning I came across a mention of this plant and realized it sounded like something I had seen in one of my favorite spots in Murray Forest. Its normal state is as a rosette of large leaves:

But after a number of years—anywhere from five to thirty, from what I’ve read—it will suddenly develop a long central stalk that will bloom into dozens of flowers. According to Midwest Naturalist, the flowering is not on a fixed schedule and it is not known what triggers it. Thankfully there are several in this spot in Murray Forest that have developed the stalk. I hope to see them blooming in the next few days. I will keep you updated!

From the weekend: the view from a lookout point at Brown County State Park

Stopped in at the Gus Grissom Memorial at Spring Mill State Park today. He was the second American in space and died tragically in a fire aboard Apollo 1 during pre-flight testing.

Chilly hike at Spring Mill State Park today

Yellowwood Lake, September 2021