Corydon, Indiana

My route to Mount Vernon at the toe of Indiana, not far from the the confluence of the Wabash and Ohio Rivers, took me through Fort Branch, a town with an abundance of Halloween skeleton decorations and a Carnegie library that I had visited in April of 2015 on my ride back to Chicago from Alabama where I helped Jim Redd find the grave of his mother on Easter Sunday.  I well remembered the Carnegie portrait in the entry as it peered down upon a retired card catalog and another relic atop it—a typewriter.  

I arrived at the library shortly before noon.  A closed sign hung on the door, but I could see a couple of ladies standing beside the circ desk.  The posted hours said the library opened at eleven on this day. The door was unlocked. When I entered, I asked if they’d like me to flip the closed sign to open.  They said they were just about to do it, but it wasn’t quite eleven yet.  

“Oh, are you on Central time here?” I asked.  They were indeed, as was the southern part of the state along the Illinois border and also along the Kentucky border almost as far east as Louisville. That didn’t effect me other than allowing me an extra hour to get to a library if it closed at five or six.  I had four ahead along the Ohio River beginning with Mount Vernon, which I hoped to get to this day if the wind from the south keeping the temperature near 90 didn’t get any stronger.

I had no pressing need to gain entry to the Mount Vernon Carnegie, as it was now the City Hall.  When I first spotted the grand, yellow-bricked, four-columned building I thought it must be a church, but Carnegie Public Library remained chiseled on its facade and Alexandria Free Library below it just over the entry.  The new antiseptic single-story sprawling library serving this city of 6,000 named for George Washington’s estate sat across the street.  

A four-lane highway connected Mount Vernon with the much larger Evansville, also on the Ohio, fifteen miles to the east.  I had previously visited its two Carnegies, so I could pass right through this sprawling metropolis.  The highway gave no glimpse of the Ohio, but beyond Evansville a five-mile bike trail hugged the shoreline of this mighty artery as far as a dam outside of  Newburgh.  The only craft I saw on the river was a huge barge.

I welcomed the tranquility of the bike path after the roar of traffic on the highway.  At least the highway had a wide shoulder giving me a better buffer than I had enjoyed on the two-lane roads.  Some had a narrow shoulder, but all too many were rendered useless to cyclists with rumble strips, a distinct hazard that one could be blown in to by passing 18-wheelers.  Indianas’s bicycle lobby doesn’t have much say allowing such unfriendly, perilous conditions.

My month of cycling around Illinois last October finishing off its slate of over one hundred Carnegies became Lincoln-themed as much as Carnegie-themed.  There were plaques and statues and commemorations of Lincoln  all over the state. I thought I might come across some of that in Indiana as well, since Lincoln spent his formative years in Indiana.  But all I saw of Lincoln for five hundred miles was a billboard with his image erected by the Foundation for a Better Life that erects billboards all over the country featuring significant figures such Mandela and Malala and Oprah and Shakespeare and John Wayne accompanied by an inspiring quote.  It’s passiton.com website doesn’t indicate any political affiliation, but one’s initial assumption is that it would be right-wing, since billboards are a favorite means of it getting out its message, especially via the plague of anti-abortion billboards.

The dearth of Lincoln acknowledgements came to an end in Rockport, the southernmost city in Indiana, fifty-miles east of its westernmost, Mount Vernon.  In the 1930s Rockport erected a Lincoln Pioneer Village replicating the nearby farm Lincoln grew up on from 1816 to 1830, leaving for Illinois when he was 21.  A couple blocks from Rockport’s Carnegie Library was the first of a sudden rush of  plaques acknowledging Lincoln.  It was placed at the site of a tavern Lincoln stayed at in 1844 on his first return to Indiana in 14 years while campaigning for Henry Clay, the Whig Party presidential candidate.

The Carnegie, which came seventy years later, had a large addition, but one could still climb the steps to its original entrance.

Beyond Rockport, on the now two-lane highway, the Ohio could be seen.  At a small park beside the river a plaque stated that Lincoln ran a ferry service there and that he even once took a load of cargo all the way to New Orleans.

The town where he lived less than twenty miles away had been renamed Lincoln City.  It was also the home town of recent Chicago Bear quarterback Jay Cutler.  If this had been a driving trip with Janina, we would have zipped up to see it.  I might have detoured to it on my bike if I didn’t have to be back in Chicago in less than two weeks for a visit from Ralph, flying in from London.

The small Carnegie in Grandview, one of the few towns I’ve passed through with a motto (“A nice place to live”), had a Lincoln plaque out front stating that he had traveled this way hauling hoop poles.  Though Grandview hadn’t grown much since its Carnegie was built in 1918, it had an addition behind it linking it to a senior center.

Fifteen miles further around a loop in the Ohio Tell City presented me with the last Carnegie in this stretch before I headed north away from the river.  With 7,000 residents, double of what it had been when it’s Carnegie was built, it was large enough for a McDonalds and a Walmart and a new library.  It’s rather run-down Carnegie was now the Tell City Historical Society, open only on Sundays from two to four.

On my way out of town I passed the high school, whose teams are known as “Marksmen,” due to the town’s name being taken from William Tell. The terrain had been forested and flat along much of the Ohio. I had a good climb leaving it, but the terrain remained mostly forested, providing one of my quieter campsites down a grassy, little-used road into a forest.  The temperature dropped overnight by more than thirty degrees returning it to normal fall temperatures. A north wind was to blame.  I’d had three days of biking into a southern wind.  When it came time to turn north the wind switched.  It meant an extra hour of riding time to Corydon, fifty miles away.

Corydon was the first capital of Indiana, replaced by Indianapolis in 1825.  It was half the size of Tell City, but had grown enough to have also replaced its Carnegie. It was now the Frederick Porter Griffin Center for local history and genealogy, just behind the new library.  It was well maintained and had grounds to match, almost enough space behind for an addition.  It was nice that it has been left in tact, a genuine pleasure to behold.