There are 169 miles of Route 50 in Indiana, from the outskirts of Cincinnati on the east to Vincennes and the Wabash River, at the border of Illinois on the west.
On Route 50 in eastern Indiana
A closer look at the building above:
Watchful eyes
In Butlerville, Indiana:
The gas station and convenience store shown below is on Route 50 in Brownstown, Indiana. At this store, as at other similar stores in the state, you are prohibited from buying more than 50 cans of smokeless tobacco in a single day.
Lawrenceburg is a town of about 5,000 people on Route 50, next to the Ohio River in eastern Indiana.
The levee gate at the end of Walnut Street
The river is on the other side of the levee shown in the photo above. The gate in the center can be closed to protect against floods.
Turn around, and you might see a train passing through town:
Looking north up Walnut Street
The Lawrenceburg police are in control:
Drive carefully
Lawrenceburg was the birthplace of James B. Eads, whom you can learn more about in the piece on the St. Louis riverfront. Lawrenceburg honored him by naming Route 50 through Lawrenceburg the Eads Parkway.
This building, fronting on Route 50 in the center of North Vernon, was once a lodge of the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal order with chapters in many American states.
How many chapters? Where located? How governed? Etc?
All this is covered in excruciating detail in the 623 pages of the Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men, Lindsay, Conley, and Litchman, Fraternity Publishing Company, 1893.
It’s free to read online. If you’re interested, search for it.
In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, some Americans were unhappy with their economic prospects. Among them were the Reno brothers — Frank, William, Simeon, and John — who lived in Indiana. They decided to improve their financial situation by robbing trains.
Perhaps they were inspired by attacks on trains by both sides during the war, intended to disrupt supply operations. In any case, the Reno brothers were the first civilians to go into the business. They assembled a gang and headed for Seymour, Indiana. At 6:30 p.m. on October 6, 1866, they committed the first train robbery in U.S. history, escaping with over $10,000, a substantial sum in those days.
Two members of the gang were arrested, but they were released after the only person willing to testify against them was shot and killed, and the Reno brothers carried on. During the next two years they robbed three more trains. One robbery, in Marshfield, Indiana, netted them $96,000.
Distressed by the condition of law enforcement in their state, the citizens of Indiana formed not just one, but two vigilante groups: the Jackson County Vigilance Committee, and the Scarlet Mask Society. As a result, vigilantes were readily available when three captured members of the Reno gang were being carried across the state by train.
The vigilantes yanked the gang members off the train and hung them from a nearby tree. A few days later, the vigilantes hauled three more captured gang members off a wagon. They hung them, too, from the very same tree. The tree was near Seymour, at the spot shown in the photo above. (The cross street is Route 50.) It has been known ever since as Hangman Crossing.
The Reno brothers themselves escaped being hung at Hangman Crossing because they were in jail. One, John, was being held in Missouri, but Frank, William, and Simeon were imprisoned in New Albany, Indiana. On December 12, 1868, one hundred vigilantes descended on the New Albany jail, overpowered the prison guards, led the three brothers outside, and hung them on the spot.
You can visit the graves of the Reno brothers. They are in Seymour’s city cemetery, fenced off and clearly marked. Except for John’s, that is. By virtue of being imprisoned in Missouri, he escaped lynching and died peacefully in 1895.
Hangman Crossing is now an unincorporated community. If you wish to live there, you might buy a house in a near-by development. It is known simply as “The Crossing.”
From 1926 to 1950, Route 50 crossed a covered bridge near Medora, Indiana. Though 50 has been re-routed, the bridge still stands. To see it, turn south from Route 50 on Indiana 235. In three miles you’ll reach Medora, a town of around 800 people.
From Medora, follow 235 east for one mile to the East Fork of the White River and the Medora covered bridge.
Covered bridges were first built in the U.S. in the early 19th century. Regarded as engineering marvels, they attracted the attention of travelers from Europe, including Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote about one in 1842 in his American Notes, “We crossed the river by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was profoundly dark, perplexed with great beams crossing and recrossing it at every possible angle . . . and I held my head down to save my head from the rafters above . . . and said to myself this cannot be reality.”
Construction of early covered bridges supported economic growth. They eliminated the need to ford rivers, and so made it easier for farmers to get grain and cattle to market. They also improved travel by foot or horse and buggy.
Local builders with experience building ships and barns constructed the bridges using the timber which was abundant in eastern North America. They covered the bridges to protect them from weather damage, because it was easier to replace degraded roofs and walls than to rebuild damaged structural elements. Windows added complexity to construction and were regarded as extras. The Medora bridge was once called “the dark bridge,” because it had no windows and its length made it particularly dark in the middle.
The walls of a covered bridge conceal how it’s built, but photos here, taken during renovation in 2010, show the Medora bridge’s structure. The wooden triangles in the sides of the bridge are trusses, a simple, economical, but strong form.
The curved wooden arches used in the Medora bridge are called Burr arches, first used in 1804 by Theodore Burr, an inventor from Connecticut. They were an important improvement in bridge technology because they increased strength while keeping the bridge deck level. Burr arches also allowed longer bridge spans, making it possible to cross wider rivers.
At 460 feet, the Medora bridge is the longest covered bridge in Indiana. In the bridge’s application for recognition on the National Register of Historic Places, run by the National Park Service, it was called “the longest surviving historic covered bridge in the United States.” The American Society of Civil Engineers recognizes it as the “longest remaining nineteenth century covered bridge structure in the United States.” It should be said, however, that an Internet search for “longest covered bridge” reveals a number of claimants for this honor.
The first covered bridge in the United States was built over the Schuykill River near Philadelphia in 1805, and the first Indiana covered bridge was built near Indianapolis in 1835.
Joseph J. Daniels built the Medora bridge in 1875. It took nine months, cost $18,142, and opened on July 15.
Information such as this is tracked by the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges, which assigns an identifying number to each bridge in its World Guide to Covered Bridges. The Medora bridge is number 14-36-04.
The exact number of covered bridges built in the U.S. is not known, but there may have been as many as 10,000, including 400 to 500 in Indiana. Today, there are around 800 U.S. covered bridges remaining, and fewer than 100 in Indiana. According to the Smithsonian Institution, an average of five covered bridges are damaged or destroyed each year, and according to the Indiana Historical Bureau, a key factor is “careless driving.”
The Medora bridge carried automobile traffic until 1970. In June 2011, a rehab of the bridge was completed, and it is now open for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
For many small communities, covered bridges provided the largest near-by covered space, and they were used for revival meetings, weddings, and political rallies. The town of Medora continued this practice when, on August 3, 2013, at 6:30 PM, it held a dinner party on its renewed bridge. More than one hundred fifty guests dined on fried chicken, ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, grape salad, hot rolls, home-made pie, iced tea, and lemonade.
The Medora bridge has a website, http://www.medoracoveredbridge.org. Go there to learn more, see photos of the renovated bridge, and perhaps make reservations for a future dinner.
The Medora covered bridge, crossing the East Fork of the White River.
This house in Vincennes, Indiana, was part of an estate called Grouseland. It was built by William Henry Harrison as his home when he was governor of the Indiana Territory. He was a member of the Whig political party with broad experience in both politics and the military, and he was elected president of the United States, despite a campaign by opposing Democrats asserting he would rather “sit in his log cabin drinking hard cider.”
As you can see, he didn’t live in a log cabin, but his own party embraced the idea that he was a man of the people. They made Harrison the Tippecanoe of the campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” He had earned the nickname when, in 1811, he led a force that defeated the Native American chief Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe.
He became the ninth president of the U.S. in 1840, but his time in office didn’t last long. He died only thirty days after his election.
What happened? There are theories …
The day of his inauguration as president was cold and wet, but to prove he really was a man of the people, Harrison refused to wear either coat or hat as he he rode horseback to the outdoor ceremony. He then read an inaugural address that lasted nearly two hours, despite having been edited to reduce its length. These actions have long been felt to be the cause of his death.
But …
Harrison followed up the inauguration by getting back on his horse to ride in the inaugural parade. He then attended three inaugural balls, and he was hardy enough to survive all that. Three weeks later, however, he apparently contracted pneumonia. It worsened and he died, despite (or because of) being treated with opium, castor oil, leeches, and Virginia snakeweed. As a result, his running mate and vice president, John Tyler, became the tenth president of the United States.
But …
A 2014 investigation of Harrison’s death concluded that he didn’t die of pneumonia, after all. Instead, this investigation found he had had a form of typhoid fever, caused by the location of the White House. At the time, it was near a dump filled with sewage.
***
That isn’t the only story involving Vincennes and presidents. It turned out that William Henry was the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison, who became the 23rd president of the United States.
And here’s another one:
Sarah Knox Taylor was born in 1814, two blocks from Grouseland. She was the daughter of a man named Zachary Taylor, and at age 21 in 1835, she married a lieutenant in the U.S. Army named Jefferson Davis.
Unfortunately, Sarah died within six months of her marriage. By doing so, however, she avoided a major conflict of interest.
In 1849, Sarah’s father, Zachary, became the twelfth president of the United States of America. Twelve years later, at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the man who used to be her husband, Jefferson Davis, became the first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
