Osgood, Indiana

Halloween and fall decorations are competing with political signs as the most predominant roadside feature on this ride around Indiana.  The campaign signs invariably come in clusters.  Of those driven to erect a sign for a candidate in the upcoming election none seem committed to just a single race but weigh in on at least half a dozen contests for clerks and sheriffs and assessors and congressional seats and more.  Pence signs abound as the Vice President’s older brother Greg is running for Congress in the southeast portion of the stage  to fill a seat long-held by a Republican. It’s the first time this former marine has run for office.  After his military career he went on to sell antiques. He has a Chicago connection having attended Loyola where he majored in philosophy and religion.  He’s all in with his brother in making America great again.

After a couple of days riding along the the Ohio River Scenic Byway at the bottom of the state I turned north from Corydon to Salem and its magnificent Carnegie, perhaps the plum of the trip so far.  It was highlighted with a dome and a wide variety of intricate ornamentation—on its columns and wooden staircases and star-patterned mosaic and stained glass window in the dome and carved  scrolls surrounding the dome.  The town had spared no expense in its construction, spending an extra $200 for iron clay bricks of Roman form.   It’s million dollar addition in 2000 only added to its luster.

Under the Carnegie portrait over an antique roll-top desk a brochure detailed the library’s history.  Up until 1903, when the Fortnightly Club applied for a Carnegie grant, the town’s library amounted to a reading room.  It had been established in the 1840s from a grant given out by the will of William Maclure, an early-day Carnegie, who had lived in the utopian community of New Harmony, one hundred miles to the west on the Wabash River.  I had passed by the town not realizing its significance.  Maclure had established a Workingman Library there in the 1820s that still serves as a library, and offered grants of $500 to other communities to establish what  was considered a library in those times—a room with some books, such as what Carnegie took advantage of as a youth in Pittsburgh.  I’ve stumbled upon a few utopian communities dating to the 1800s in my cycling around the US.   With no present-day utopias to search out, I consider myself a traveling utopia—self-sufficient without much dependence on others, free of guile or presumption, cognizant of the common good and wrapped in contentment. 

The Salem brochure described the opening of its Carnegie in July of 1905 as a celebrated event attracting more than 3,000 people for their first look into the grandest building in the county.  The brochure offered a strong endorsement for libraries saying more people visit libraries in a year than attend movies and sporting events combined.  It said there are more than 16,000 public libraries in the US, with 282 in Indiana.  Carnegie provided the funds for 167 libraries in Indiana, of which 98 still serve as libraries.  They were so well-constructed, all but eighteen of the 167 still stand.

From Salem I turned east back to the Ohio River Scenic Byway fifty miles away and three more Carnegies in towns along the Ohio.  In Madison in front of its courthouse  I spotted one of the 200 Statues of Liberty scattered around the US that were provided by  the Boy Scouts of America in 1950 to celebrate its 40th anniversary in a program called Strengthen the Arm of Liberty.  It’s the second I’ve come upon in my travels, the first last year on my circuit of Illinois.  Wikipedia lists about 150 of them.  There are five others in Indiana that I might be able to add to my itinerary.

Madison had a fine old library, but not a Carnegie.  The next was in Vevay.  I arrived on Saturday as it was celebrating its Fall Festival with carnival rides and vendors selling food and all matter of items—bird houses, crafty art, Halloween costumes and decorations along with pumpkins and gourds.  When I asked a pair of young women the whereabouts of the library, they couldn’t tell me as they said they weren’t from around there.  

The library was down Ferry Street near the river.  It had replaced the Carnegie, which was now the City Hall.

Facing it was an arts and crafts store that drew attention to its self with a bike sculpture.

It was thirty miles to the next Carnegie in Rising Sun on a winding road following the Ohio.  I passed a couple of campsites catering to Recreational Vehicles, many of which looked like permanent habitations, where I could have camped if it weren’t so easy to slip into a forest.  As elsewhere along the river, there was a large casino complex and large factories belching billowing white clouds.  Much of the traffic was pickup trucks. 

The address Wikipedia gave for the library was wrong and also the information that the Carnegie still functioned as a library.  The address given was for new library on 2nd street.  It closed at one on Saturdays, after I arrived, so I couldn’t ask about the Carnegie.  Rising Sun, as other towns along the Ohio trying to attract tourists, has a visitor center.  The guy tending it had lived his entire life there but could only give me a general idea  where the library had been, though he patronized it up until it had been replaced a little more than a decade ago.  He just knew it was up the next road and down a ways.  He suggested I go to the History Museum a block away to find its exact location. The guy there could direct me to it’s precise location at the corner of Main and High.

The building was vacant and no longer bore any designation on it of having been a library.  An old-timer across the street was conducting a yard sale.  He didn’t approve of the new library—“They would have been better off to have kept it.  I like the old stuff.”

It was thirteen miles to Lawrenceburg, a veritable city where the Ohio River turns south from Ohio twenty-five miles beyond Cincinnati and commences being the boundary between Ohio and Indiana.  It’s Carnegie had been ignominiously swallowed up on three sides by a huge addition.  All that could be seen of the original building was its roof and a side wall.  It was closed when I dropped by.  I had to confirm with a police officer at the station a block away, that it had indeed been the original library.

Then it was west into the setting sun to Osgood, thirty miles away.  I had so many options for camping I could wait until just before dark to duck into a forest.  With the temperature not much above fifty all day I was able to buy a half gallon of chocolate milk early in the day for a lunch time bowl of shredded wheat and then another first thing in the morning.  No need to stop at McDonalds the past two days for its one-dollar unlimited cold drinks.  It was a relief to be freed of the craving for ice-choked cups of soda.

Osgood’s Carnegie had an addition to its back, which had become its new entrance, closing the original front-side entrance with Carnegie Public Library chiseled above it.

The next Carnegie is in Franklin south of Indianapolis, then its up to the northeast corner of the state for a cluster of four with three others on the way and a couple more afterwards on my return to Chicago.  Ten to go and I’ll have completed my mission.