Springtown Cemetery

Posted on January 14, 2020 by admin

Near the entrance to Marengo Cave in Marengo, Indiana, is a patch of land called Springtown Cemetery. Some of the cave runs further underneath, I think.

A sign outside the cemetery fence says: This cemetery, one of the first in this area, dates back to the early 1800s, when Marengo was known as Springtown. Oris Hiestand, one of the discoverers of Marengo Cave, is buried here. The land for the cemetery was given to the town by Mr. Samuel M. Stewart, the first owner of Marengo Cave.

The rain had just slacked off when I took a look around. It isn’t overcrowded with stones.
The stones might or might not represent everyone who’s buried there. Someone may know for sure. Or not.

A few unexpected touches of green in late December.
Mossy, wet stones honoring obscure people in an obscure corner of the world.If that’s not a momento mori, I don’t know what is.

Marengo Cave

Posted on January 13, 2020 by admin

Here’s something in the category of Things You Find Out Later: the Marengo Warehouse Distribution Center. It’s in Marengo, Indiana, and according to its web site, it’s “one of the largest underground storage facilities in the United States… The complex is located 160 feet (49 m) underground in a former limestone quarry and comprises nearly 4 million square feet of space.”

Elsewhere on the same page, its total storage capacity is said to be “more than 3 million square feet,” but never mind. Sounds like an impressive underground storage facility. About 20 years ago, I visited another such place, SubTropolis in Kansas City, Mo., which at 6.5 million square feet is king of the underground storage facilities, at least the ones we know about.

When we visited Marengo Cave on the afternoon of December 29, I had no idea about the nearby Marengo Warehouse Distribution Center, a complex of storage chambers and roadways carved out of the same Indiana limestone as the naturally forming cave. I found out about the warehouse later, when looking for further information about the cave. Reportedly the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency stores vast numbers of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) there.

Marengo’s a small town in Crawford County, population somewhat over 800, and about 40 miles from Louisville. If that city someday becomes more robust in its growth, Marengo might be exurban or even an outer suburb, but for now it’s a small Indiana town with one main attraction: a show cave discovered in the late 19th century and measuring about five miles of known passages.

We took the mile-long Dripstone Trail walking tour, by spots with fanciful names, such as Sherwood Forest, Looking Glass Lake, Washington Avenue, The Masher, Music Hall and Penny Ceiling. That last one features a muddy roof to which pennies, or other objects, will stick if you throw them hard enough. The guide invited us to throw pennies up to the ceiling, noting that cave management would eventually remove them to donate to charity, something like pennies in a fountain, so many of us heaved our coins ceiling-ward. Me too. Mine stuck.

The place has some nice features.

Including historic graffiti. Unlawful to do now, but not for much of the cave’s history after its discovery.

According to our guide, the deepest point of the tour was 200-plus feet below the surface. But, she said, we might have noticed that we hadn’t descended very far on our walk. Indeed we hadn’t — after the initial climb down some stairs, and a few other drops, most of the trail was level. At the same time, she said, the ground above was rising. It’s hilly terrain, after all.

Divers Southern Indiana Courthouses &c

Posted on January 12, 2020 by admin

Bloomington is the county seat of Monroe County, Indiana, and sports an impressive downtown courthouse, a 1908 Beaux Arts design by Hoosier architects Wing & Mahurin.

The building was closed for the weekend, but I took a look at the exterior just before dusk. While I stood there, strings of lights lit up.
What’s a county courthouse without some allegories?
Or a war memorial? At first glance, it looks like a Civil War memorial only, but it specifically honors veterans of the war with Mexico, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World War I.
While in Nashville, Indiana, I took a quick look at the more modest, but also handsome Brown County Courthouse, a structure from the 1870s.
Nashville has some other interesting buildings as well, such as the Nashville United Methodist Church.

This looks to be a former Masonic building, though I’ve only looked into the matter enough to know that the Nashville, Indiana, Masonic Lodge #135 isn’t in that building, but a newer-looking one. But the older building does say LODGE on the front facade in large letters, along with Masonic symbols on either side.

Nashville isn’t a very large town, but there are streets away from the main tourist drag, Van Buren St. On just such a street we happened across a tree-carving studio.
Besides Elvis and a bear, you can also find Willie Nelson in wood there.
And one of the popular ideas of a space alien.
One more courthouse: a good-looking structure in Paoli, Indiana, county seat of Orange County. We passed through town on the way to West Baden Springs, but didn’t stop in the intense rain. Even so, the courthouse caught our attention.

West Baden Springs Hotel

Posted on January 9, 2020 by admin

Tibetan-style structures and T.C. Steele’s property and all the other places we saw in southern Indiana near the end of December were worth seeing, but none were the main reason we went down that way.

That would be the West Baden Springs Hotel, one of the grand old hotels of the nation, revived in our time to an astonishing degree. Magnificent as the Hotel del Coronado or the Waldorf-Astoria, historic as the Fordyce at Hot Springs National Park or the Boca Raton Resort & Club.

We drove south from Bloomington in intermittent rain on the morning of December 29 to the town of West Baden, in Orange County, Indiana, an otherwise rural place with a county population of a shade less than 20,000. The hotel was impossible to miss driving into town. Even at some distance, it cuts an impressive figure.

More so closer in.

There’s been a hotel on the site since 1855, at first called the Mile Lick Inn. Why in this obscure part of Indiana? The waters, of course. Indians knew about the springs and so did Frenchmen, who lent their national name to the nearby French Lick Springs Hotel, about a mile from the West Baden Springs Hotel.

Eventually a branding impulse kicked in, and Mile Lick became West Baden Springs, to capture some of the Victorian cachet of Baden-Baden in Germany, where the Euro-elite took the waters. I learned pretty quickly, by the way, that the Hoosier way to say the name is West BAY-den, not BAA-den.

The original West Baden Springs burned down just after the turn of the 20th century. The owner, Lee W. Sinclair, wanted something even grander replace it — something to best the rival French Lick Springs Hotel — and so he built the current hotel.

“Sinclair… envisioned a circular building topped with the world’s largest dome, decorated like the grandest spas of Europe,” notes the hotel web site. “Architect Harrison Albright of West Virginia [who designed the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego, too] accepted Sinclair’s commission and agreed to complete the project within a year. The new hotel, complete with a 200-foot diameter atrium and fireplace that burned 14-foot logs, opened for business in June of 1902.”

Later, Sinclair’s daughter and son-in-law redesigned the hotel a new level of opulence in the ’20s that characterized West Baden Springs Hotel until the Depression crushed its business model. The rest of the 20th century was unkind to the property, especially the last years of the century.

“In January 1991, a buildup of ice and water on the roof and in drainpipes caused the collapse of a portion of the exterior wall,” the web site says. “In 1992, Indiana Landmarks spent $140,000 to stabilize the hotel, matching a $70,000 contribution from an anonymous donor. In May 1994 the hotel was sold to Minnesota Investment Partners (MIP) for $500,000. Grand Casinos Inc., an investor in the purchase, optioned the hotel from MIP. The Cook Group Inc., a global medical device manufacturing company headquartered nearby in Bloomington, stepped in to preserve both the French Lick and West Baden Springs Hotels.”

That is to say, the Cook family — medical-device billionaires — took an interest in the place. Eventually they oversaw the renovation of West Baden Springs, as well as French Lick Springs, at great expense. But not without what I imagine must be a healthy return, now that a major new Cook-owned casino (next to French Lick Springs) is open for business. All of the properties (West Baden Springs, French Lick Springs and the new casino) are part of the French Lick Resort Casino, an operation licensed by the state of Indiana in 2006.

I’ve read variously that the West Baden Springs Hotel dome was the nation’s largest freestanding structure of its kind until the completion of the Charlotte Coliseum in 1955 or the Astrodome in 1965. Whatever the case, the thing to do in our time is wander into the hotel atrium, stand under the dome, and be amazed. Ordinary photos can’t convey the sweep of the place or the its grand scope, but never mind.

Other parts of the hotel have their own flourishes, such as the stained-glass windows near the front entrance, added by Jesuits when they owned the property in the mid-century. Quite a story.

We rode a trolley over to French Lick Springs for a look. Posh, certainly, and also a historic hotel — that’s where Pluto Water used to come from, and walls are covered with glossy pics of famous guests — but it’s only worth seeing, not worth going to see, like West Baden Springs.

T.C. Steele State Historic Site

Posted on January 8, 2020 by admin

Back in March 2002, we visited Columbus, Indiana, and took a foray west from there to visit Nashville (Indiana), Brown County State Park and the T.C. Steel State Historic Site. That last one was still closed for the winter.

These days, the site is open year-round. So around noon on December 28, we drove east from Bloomington, less than 30 minutes out of town, into hilly, rural Brown County and on to the state historic site.
In the early 20th century, Theodore Clement Steele and his second wife Selma acquired acreage — played-out farmland — in Brown County and set about building a hilltop house. After various modifications and additions, including a few other buildings, the place became their full-time residence and his main studio space. Even as a museum, the place is homey, full of furniture and other items the Steeles owned, with little roped off from visitors.
The view from downhill.
T.C. Steele is best remembered now for landscapes, but also did a lot of portraits, since that’s where the money was. Numerous examples of both hang in the main house, as well as the larger building nearby (“Big Studio”), well lit by an enormous window.
No doubt about it, Steele had a gift for landscapes. One I especially liked was “Selma in the Garden,” which is hanging in Big Studio. Other examples of his work are here. While T.C. painted, Selma gardened, as nicely depicted by the above-mentioned painting. The land might not have been great for farming, but Selma apparently had the knack for making her gardens flourish.

Gardening isn’t so much in evidence in winter. Still, the grounds are inviting.
We spent time tramping around the woods near the house. Since this was previously farm land, the trees are mostly second growth, some of which the Steeles planted.
Thick with leaves. At that moment, the ground was too warm for snow cover.
T.C. Steele State Historic Site In a poetic touch, the Steeles named their place The House of the Singing Winds. Our visit wasn’t on a windy day, so that isn’t what we heard out on the hillside. Rather, the crunching of leaves underfoot. Without the sound of traffic coming from all directions, and with birds and insects quiet or gone for the season, that was about all we heard. That by itself was a good reason to get out of town.

Yellow Hat in Indiana

Posted on January 7, 2020 by admin

That the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center is on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, seems like it ought to be a surprise. But no. Diasporas of all stripes come to North America to enrich our tapestry.

But why Bloomington? More than 50 years ago, Thubten Jigme Norbu (d. 2008), the Dalai Lama’s brother and also an exile, accepted a position at Indiana University, founding one of the United States’ first Tibetan Studies programs.

“In 1978, a donation of 108 acres of land in southeast Bloomington enabled Norbu to found the Tibetan Cultural Center…” Bloom Magazine says. “With the help of volunteers and donations, multiple structures have been built over time, among them the only stupa (religious monument) dedicated to the more than one million Tibetans who have died since the beginning of the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, as well as other structures rarely found outside of the Himalayan region, including a mani korlo (prayer wheel house).”

We arrived at the TMBCC on the morning of December 28. There’s more than one stupa on the grounds.
The prayer wheel house. It reminded me of the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Monastery in Mongolia.

The grounds wind through wooded land and eventually you come to the Kumbum Chamtse Ling Monastery.
Behind the monastery is another structure — and a lot of prayer flags.
While inside the monastery, we were told that a fire puja ceremony was in the offing behind the building. I’ve read about them since, but find the concept hard to get my head around, so I’ll leave the details for others to explain.

I just know what I saw and heard. Monks chanted, built a fire and burned a variety of materials, such as grain and flowers. Under a tent to one side, more monks chanted. People watched from another tent, and under yet another stood a table arrayed with the items to be burned.

Not quite sure how long we watched and listened to the chanting. I didn’t understand a lick of it, yet somehow it was mesmerizing.

The Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art

Posted on January 6, 2020 by admin

We didn’t go to St. Louis just after Christmas, much less time travel to St. Louis to see the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. But in a way, we did.

“Occupying two square miles on the western side of St. Louis, the 1904 World’s Fair was the largest in history, with 1,272 acres containing more than 1,500 buildings,” Serious Eats tells us.

“At the heart of the exposition were 11 monumental ‘palaces,’ each dedicated to a subject, such as Electricity, Fine Arts, Horticulture, or Machinery. Sixty-two countries and 42 American states had their own halls or buildings, where they displayed the highest achievements of their cultures and economies… They were designed not to endure for the ages but to captivate the crowds for a brief moment.”

With a few exceptions. The former Palace of Fine Arts is now the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park, which we visited during one of our trips to St. Louis. The Connecticut Building at the fair is now the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art in Lafayette, Indiana. That’s where we went during our end-of-December trip.
We arrived about 30 minutes before closing on December 27, but decided pay the admission and look around anyway. Glad we did. Time was short, but one of the volunteers gave us a tour. Spontaneously, since (I think) admission normally gets you a self-guided tour.

She took us from room to room, each well appointed, noting some of the museum’s highlights — paintings by Indiana artists, ceramics, bronzes, towering grandfather clocks, a wide array of other antique furniture, a model train that traversed between two rooms, and this time of the year, Christmas trees and wreaths and other elaborate seasonal decor. Especially prominent on the walls were works by T.C. Steele, Hoosier landscape painter of renown, with numerous other Indiana artists represented as well. Though it’s a fine house museum, the Haan’s specialty is art created in Indiana.

Our guide also told us the story of how the house ended up in Indiana after its stint at the 1904 World’s Fair. The tale began in Connecticut.

“The Charles and Lydia Sigourney mansion in Hartford provided the inspiration for the building,” writes the the Connecticut Historical Society’s Karen DePauw. “The Connecticut commissioners to the Exposition felt the house represented colonial ideas, as well as stood for cultural and social life in present-day Connecticut. Edward T. Hapgood was hired as the architect, and H. Wales Lines Co. served as builders.”

A wealthy fellow from Lafayette, one William Potter, visited the fair and liked the house so much he bought it. Or rather, his wife liked the house so much he bought it and had it rebuilt in Indiana for them to live in: three full floors, a basement, seven fireplaces, five-and-a-half bathrooms, a 26-light brass-and-crystal chandelier, and a double staircase leading to the second floor, among other posh features.

Closer to our time, the Haans, who made their money selling sewing kits to junior high schools, acquired the property in the 1980s as a residence. They’re also collectors of Indiana art, which accumulated over the decades — as things do in a house — and a few years ago they deeded the house to a nonprofit to display their collection.

Behind the house is more art: a sculpture garden sporting Indiana-created work. Such as “Venus Rising” by Tuck Langland of Granger.
“The Miner” by Peter Rujuwa.
Rujuwa, originally from Zimbabwe, now of Indianapolis, also did “The Guitarist.”
“Metal Menagerie” by Roy Patrick of Lafayette.
“Garden Art” by Kathleen Kitch of Lafayette.
Pretty soon we noticed something moving in the sculpture garden. A little cat.
He followed us around for a while, but then lost interest and spent time climbing trees behind the artwork.

Southern Indiana at the End of the 2010s

Posted on January 5, 2020 by admin

A new decade is underway, and don’t let nitpickers tell you otherwise. At midnight as 2020 began — the beginning of the 2020s — I stepped outside for a listen, as I do most years. Pop-pop-pop went the fireworks in the freezing air.

If you know where to look in southern Indiana, about 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis, you’ll find yourself standing near a Tibetan stupa. I did that myself ahead of the New Year.
We wanted to take a trip between Christmas and New Year’s, but nowhere too far or expensive. In that case, weather is the main variable. A blizzard, or even heavy snow or subzero temps, would have kept us home. But post-Christmas forecasts called for mild temps until December 30 throughout our part of the Midwest.

So on December 27, we drove to southern Indiana by way of Lafayette and Indianapolis, stopping in the former but not the latter. We arrived in Lafayette just in time to visit the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, and take a look at the sculpture garden and nature walk behind it.

That evening we arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, where we spent the next three nights. Bloomington is home of the largest branch of Indiana University, one boasting nearly 50,000 students and the Kinsey Institute besides. But just after Christmas, the place is practically deserted. A ghost university.

On December 28, we spent much of the morning at the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center, which is out on the edge of Bloomington. We saw the stupas and the prayer wheels and flags and the Kumbum Chamtse Ling Monastery. We also happened to be there in time to see a fire puja ceremony.

We spent most of the afternoon that day in rural Brown County at the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, hilltop home and studio of the landscape painter of that name in the early 20th century. We also popped over to Nashville, Indiana, where we’d been in 2002. Instead of artwork, we bought lunch there this time.

The day was good for walking around outside — nearly 60 degrees F. and cloudy, but no rain. About as pleasant as you’re going to get in late December. The next day was nearly as warm, but rain fell on and off all day, sometimes heavily.

A good day for indoor sites. On the morning of the 29th, we headed south, deep into the rolling hills of southern Indiana, to visit the striking West Baden Springs Hotel, a grand hotel of the past revived only in recent years, along with its former rival and current sister property, the French Lick Springs Hotel, one-time home of Pluto Water.

After a lunch stop in Paoli, Indiana, we went to Marengo Cave, a limestone show cave under the small town of Marengo, and spent more than an hour among the stalagmites and -tites and flowstone. Near the cave’s entrance, a bonus site: a 19th-century Hoosier cemetery, whose weather-beaten stores were picturesquely wet with the most recent weather.

The 30th proved to be cold, though not quite cold enough for snow or ice. We drove home in the morning, stopping only for gas and rest stops. Strong winds blew. Sometimes strong enough to push the car slightly to the side. I white-knuckled the steering wheel a few times as a result.

The wind gusts also captured flags and pulled them straight. Here is Indiana’s flag at a rest stop. Better than those with a state seal slapped on: a golden torch and 19 stars, to symbolize Hoosier enlightenment and the state’s place as 19th to join the union.

The Eugene V. Debs House

Posted on June 18, 2019 by admin

Tucked away among the buildings and open fields of Indiana State University in Terra Haute is a structure from the Gilded Age, but also associated with the golden age of socialism in the United States: the Eugene V. Debs House.

We arrived in the mid-afternoon on Saturday, in time to take a detailed tour from an exceptionally knowledgeable guide, but not for an event earlier that day in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Pullman Strike.

Debs led the strike, of course, and for his trouble was tossed in the McHenry County Jail in Woodstock, Illinois, for six months — an event that radicalized him. After he got out, his commitment to socialism never wavered.

The museum’s event involved a book signing of a new volume about the Pullman Strike — The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America by Jack Kelly — and a reading of “Liberty,” the speech that Debs delivered to a crowd of thousands of supporters in Chicago after his release from Woodstock Jail, on November 22, 1895.

It was a speech I’d never read, so I looked it up later. Credit to Debs for giving good speeches in an era when political discourse hadn’t yet been dumbed down to semiliterate 280-character bursts. A couple of selections:

“Out of range of the government’s machine guns and knowing the location of judicial traps and deadfalls, Americans may still indulge in the exaltation of liberty, though pursued through every lane and avenue of life by the baying hounds of usurped and unconstitutional power, glad if when night lets down her sable curtains, they are out of prison, though still the wage-slaves of a plutocracy which, were it in the celestial city, would wreck every avenue leading up to the throne of the Infinite by stealing the gold with which they are paved, and debauch Heaven’s supreme court to obtain a decision that the command ‘thou shalt not steal’ is unconstitutional…

“I remember one old divine who, one night, selected for his text George M. Pullman, and said: ‘George is a bad egg, handle him with care. Should you crack his shell the odor would depopulate Chicago in an hour.’ All said ‘Amen’ and the services closed.

“Another old sermonizer who said he had been preaching since man was a molecule, declared he had of late years studied corporations, and that they were warts on the nose of our national industries, — that they were vultures whose beaks and claws were tearing and mangling the vitals of labor and transforming workingmen’s homes into caves.”

The museum staff was giving away souvenir ribbons, replicas of the ribbons worn by supporters who greeted Debs when he got out of Woodstock. We got one.

The house is both a house museum of the period, with many of the Debs’ possessions, as well as a museum about labor organizing, American socialism — Debs was adamant that the ideology wasn’t some imported Euro-virus — and the fight against government overreach, as expressed by siding with the bosses in the ’90s and the sedition laws of the First World War.

It was a pretty nice house for its time, vintage 1890. I understand that Debs caught some flack for living in a comfortable house. Comfortable with a few touches of affluence, since his wife Kate brought some money to the marriage. Some of the fireplaces feature cobalt blue porcelain tiles imported from Italy, the mahogany dining and parlor furniture is pretty nice, and a display case sports the Debs’ set of Haviland china.

Of course that’s the kind of lightweight criticism that politicians and activists of all stripes receive. The house was clearly upper-middle class for the time, but so what? The Debs were supposed to live in a shotgun shack? Besides, bread and roses.

Also on display are a number of depictions of Debs. This one is by Wisconsin sculptor Louis B. Mayer (not the movie mogul).

LM could also be Louis Mayer. In any case, this is also a sedition trial-era work.

Plus plenty of buttons from Debs’ many runs for president.
In the house’s attic, which was once merely storage, all of the walls are covered with murals. The centerpiece is Debs in campaigning mode.
One of the smaller details on the mural walls, but one I liked best, is a campaign button from 1920. Debs received 3.5 percent of the popular vote, more than any other socialist candidate for U.S. president, before or since. While in federal prison.
The museum notes: “The murals were painted by John Laska, former Professor of Art at Indiana State University and active Foundation member. Completed in 1979 after three years of hard work, the murals depict Debs’ life and time in chronological order…”

The Ernie Pyle museum reminded me of a long-ago English teacher of mine, Mr. Swinny. The Debs museum reminded me of another long-ago teacher, Mrs. Collins. She taught us freshman U.S. history. About 60 at the time, she grew up in Buffalo and — I think I remember this correctly — had been a Wobbly as a young woman.

That would have been during the Depression, after the heyday of the Wobblies, but still. Mrs. Collins wasn’t shy about throwing in some labor history and using texts sympathetic to socialism, most notably The Jungle. Naturally, Debs came up as well.

The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum

Posted on June 17, 2019 by admin

I have a sneaking suspicion that the later 21st century is going to be completely indifferent to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Like almost everyone else, he’ll join the ranks of the obscure. The items now collected at the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in rural Indiana will scatter to archives or private collections or landfills. Only occasionally will anyone read his writings, as found in libraries or odd corners of the Internet.

The process is already underway. The museum used to be the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site, owned and run by the state of Indiana. When the recession came 10 years ago, state budgets suffered. I doubt that anyone put it down officially in a memo or the like, but I’m sure the decision to close the Ernie Pyle SHS came down to, “Who’s heard of him anyway?”

A nonprofit, the Friends of Ernie Pyle, now owns the site and carries on the struggle against obscurity. The organization renamed the museum nearly a decade ago. Yet Randy McNally, in its 2017 Road Atlas, still calls it a state historic site. So does Google Maps. It isn’t a place that gets a lot of attention.

We arrived in the hamlet of Dana, Indiana, early in the afternoon on Saturday. Rain had dogged us most of the way from Champaign, Illinois, where we’d spent the previous night. The museum includes the house in which Ernie Pyle was born in 1900, relocated from the nearby farm fields.

Next to the birth house are two Quonset huts, World War II vintage but never used for military purposes, that house displays and Ernie Pyle artifacts. It continued to rain while we were in the huts, with drops drumming on the metal in their distinctive way the whole time.

I probably would have heard about Ernie Pyle later anyway, but I like to think that the reason we came was that Bill Swinny, one of my high school English teachers, planted the seed by telling us about him during class one day. Mr. Swinny, who taught us a good deal more than high school-level literature, managed to convey how upset the nation was at the death of Ernie Pyle, coming as it did right after the death of President Roosevelt.

We were the only visitors at the museum. An informative woman in her 60s took our admission. Also on staff was a much quieter young man, perhaps as young as 20 and perhaps a relative of the older woman, who was doing his bit to help out, though that’s just a guess on my part.

The larger displays, including Pyle-like mannequins standing in for him, evoke Ernie Pyle’s wartime circumstances. That is, living with the GIs he wrote about.
A good number of his columns are posted for visitors to read. You can also listen to excerpts from the columns by picking up telephone receivers. There are a few videos. One is devoted to a single early 1944 column, “The Death of Captain Waskow.” As well it should be, since the column is a masterpiece of reportage.

Good to know that Ernie Pyle got a Purple Heart, by act of Congress in 1983. A rare honor for a civilian.
The birth house was interesting, though less compelling. But I did learn that Ernest Taylor Pyle was born poor. At the time of his birth, his parents were tenant farmers.

The museum isn’t quite all there is when it comes to commemorating Ernie Pyle in that part of Indiana. A few miles to the east of Dana, on U.S. 36, is the Ernie Pyle Rest Park, essentially a wayside rest stop. One feature stands out, and got me to stop despite the rain.

It’s a replica of Ernie Pyle’s memorial on Ie Shima, the small island on which he was killed by enemy fire.

At This Spot
The
77th Infantry Division
Lost A Buddy
Ernie Pyle
18 April 1945

This is a replica of the original built at Ie Shima by the 111S Engineer Combat Group United States Army.

I can’t speak for Ernie Pyle, but I imagine that the thought of being forgotten by future generations might not have troubled him. I get the sense that he would have preferred that the men he wrote about be remembered instead.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Indiana