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The winding road to Bloomington
Imagery ©2012 TerraMetrics. Map data ©2012 Google. Modern four-lane State Road 37 bypassed 15 glorious, winding miles of the original Dixie Highway sometime during the 1960s. They are great fun to...
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The courthouse in Bloomington
Our Dixie Highway adventure brought us to Bloomington soon enough. I’m pretty sure the Dixie passed through town on Walnut St. Given that Walnut is one way northbound to just south of downtown today,...
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Abandoned Dixie Highway at Oolitic
Imagery ©2012 DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, IndianaMap Framework Data, USDA Farm Service Agency. Map data ©2012 Google. Remarkably, 19 miles of the original, narrow, winding Dixie Highway stretches south out...
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Revisiting Bedford
I’ve been driving Indiana’s old roads for so many years now that road trips regularly take me through places I’ve been before, where one old road meets another. Two years ago I explored US 50 across...
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On Paoli’s square
Imagery ©2012 DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, IndianaMap Framework Data, USDA Farm Service Agency. Map data ©2012 Google. I’ll never forget the first time I visited Paoli. Calling it a visit is a bit of a...
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Film photos from the Dixie Highway
When I take a road trip I always bring my digital camera. I also bring my extra battery, because I take hundreds of photos when on the road and hate to run out of juice. My recent trip along the Dixie...
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See it now
After exploring the Midwest’s old highways for the past seven years, this is the most important thing I’ve learned: See it now. The roadway’s built environment changes with time, and artifacts of the...
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A hundred-year-old brick road
It was a day of ceremony and celebration, the day in 1915 that the first brick was laid on the Dixie Highway in Martinsville, Indiana. Last year I explored the old Dixie Highway in southern Indiana....
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Sycamore Row
Truth is, nobody knows for sure why the sycamore trees line this short stretch of road. The historical marker claims that the trees grew from green sycamore logs cut and laid across the road in the...
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Captured: Bob’s Century
I was in a super bad mood the other day and decided to distract myself from it by looking back through some photographs from just after I got my first digital camera, a Kodak EasyShare Z730. I found...
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Captured: Courthouse at Paoli
Once in a while, one of my old posts gets shared on Facebook and picks up a bunch of views. So it went a couple weeks ago with a 2012 post about the great public square in Paoli, a Dixie Highway town...
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Sleep in a wigwam
The sign says, “Sleep in a Wigwam,” but these are actually tipis. A wigwam is a domed structure. But the fellow who invented this motel concept just liked the sound of the word wigwam better. Thus a...
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Vintage motel signs on the Dixie Highway in Cave City, KY
The Wigwam Village isn’t the only classic motel in Cave City, Kentucky. It’s just the most distinctive. The Holiday Motel and the Caveland Motel have the best vintage signs of all the old motels in...
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1880 Paoli bridge, destroyed
This was the scene on the 1880 iron truss bridge in Paoli, Indiana, on Christmas Day. From the Facebook page of the French Lick Fire Dept. Despite the signs on both sides of this bridge declaring no...
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On the Dixie Highway in Indiana Canon PowerShot S95 2012 My friend Dawn and I drove the Dixie from Indianapolis to Paoli a few years ago, and stopped to walk a while along this old alignment. I’ll be...
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Abandoned Dixie Highway Canon PowerShot S95 2012 A limestone (I think) pit was dug north of Oolitic, a small town in southern Indiana. It obliterated a section of the old Dixie Highway (and former...
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Their own private highway bridge
Imagery and map data © 2017 Google Once upon a time, State Road 37 (also the Dixie Highway) passed through Indianapolis on a two-lane alignment. But as the main artery to Bloomington, I’m sure that...
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single frame: Abandoned Dixie Highway
Abandoned Dixie Highway Pentax K10D, 28-80mm f/3.5-4.7 SMC Pentax-FA 2017 I used to write up every road trip I took in meticulous detail. I thought these old highways were interesting, and I figured...
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Endangered: 1925 pony truss bridge on southern Indiana’s Dixie Highway
This is one of my favorite old highway bridges. It’s tucked quietly away on a short old alignment of Indiana State Road 37, the old Dixie Highway, just south of Martinsville. Here’s a photo from my...
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Is old road pavement worth preserving?
I’ve shared photos of this concrete road segment many times on this blog as a great example of early American hard pavement. It was probably poured in the early 1920s. But sadly, it no longer exists....
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