Today’s Presentation
Program: Hidden Gems
Speaker: Suzanne Stanis, Vice President of Education and more, Indiana Landmarks
Introduced By: Jeff Rasley
Attendance: NESC: 88, Zoom: 27
Guest(s): David Field, Penny Lipp, Terry Langdon
Scribe: Alan Schmidt
Editor: Ed Nitka
View a recording of today’s Zoom presentation at:
Today's Program 052024
Suzanne Stanis is the Vice President of Education for Indiana Landmarks. She has a bachelor’s degree from Hanover College and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University. Suzanne is the creator of continuing education courses, workshops, and children’s camps. She also supervises Indiana Landmarks’ heritage tourism divisions in Indianapolis; French Lick; West Baden Springs; and Samara, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in West Lafayette. During her 30-plus years with Indiana Landmarks, she has researched and nominated over fifteen buildings and neighborhoods to the National Register of Historic Places. As librarian for the organization, Suzanne regularly assists people researching and restoring historic houses.
The talk described the history and architecture of historic places in Indiana, as well as the challenges of building restoration. The talk included photos of some of Indiana's hidden gems and Landmark projects of homes, restaurants, shops, parks, cemeteries, covered bridges, churches, and museums.
Indiana Landmarks provides guided tours of Indianapolis to help Indiana Landmarks fulfill its mission to save meaningful places across the state. Check indianalandmarks.org/tours-events at: 317 639-4534 or better yet https://www.indianalandmarks.org/tours-events/ongoing-tours-events/.
Indiana Landmarks is the largest statewide community group of its kind in the U.S. Their first project was the Morris-Butler House used as its first headquarters in Indianapolis. In 1975 in the Lockerbie Square Historic District, they worked on the George Holler House. For some dwellings, they do minimal work to stabilize the structure and then resell them as a single-family home. They helped protect an interracial school on Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis. In Marion they put a new roof on an endangered first run Quaker Church. Some sacred places are threatened due to congregation membership decline since COVID-19 such as St. Athanasius Byzantine Church in Indianapolis. Landmarks assisted with that restoration.
The E. L. Kennedy family designed 58 bridges in Rush County. Suzanne Stanis provided pictures of his wooden bridges built in 1886 and 1888. The Save Our Bridges group identifying as we are the bridge people helped save some wooden bridges. A
wooden bridge was destroyed by a tornado in 2008 but was reconstructed with public and private support.
In New Carlisle’s Bendix Woods County Park aerial pictures showed a distinctive “Studebaker” spelled out from pine tree plantings started in 1938 at the former test track. The Studebaker plant closed in 1963. Indiana Landmarks is studying and maintaining the tree pattern.
Natural gas supplies in eastern Indiana were exploited, and significantly wasted including burning torches, starting in 1885 under the control of Ball Brothers for manufacturing glass jars. By 1914 the natural gas field was depleted. There is a glass museum in Greentown outside Kokomo. Kokomo Opalescent Glass started in 1888 and is still going having sent glass to the Vatican, Disney, Tiffany, and Frank Loyd Wright. They use beehive kilns to melt the glass, then spread glass and color on metal sheets, and make exquisite stained glass.
The original frozen custard stand was started in 1932 in Lafayette. The building had an Art Modern Cruise Ship of Custard design. A custard cone at the stand cost a nickel at the time. The stainless-steel structure was designed by Mountain View Diners in New Jersey and brought to Indiana via railroad. The diner closed in 2010, but Plainfield donated land so it could be reopened as the Oasis Diner.
Indiana Landmarks has protected and preserved a number of structures. At Camp Atterbury, a small German-Italian sanctuary was made by POWs from scrap material with colors provided from berries. In Jasper there is a grotto with walls made of geodes. At St. Mary of the Woods, there is a chapel with patterns of Wabash River mussels inside from 1876. Camp Chesterfield was started by the Indiana Association of Spiritualists Trail of Religion in 1886. Some historical lodges are endangered such as the Order of Odd Fellows. The Elks Lodge in Bedford was converted to residential and mixed use. The Crystal Beach in Madison, Indiana was rehabilitated and is used for events and recreation. In Kokomo’s Highland Park there is the first 1965 Ponderosa Steak house, “Old Ben” the world’s largest stuffed steer, and a preserved 800-year-old sycamore tree stump more than 57 feet in circumference and 12 feet high. Crawfordsville had an unusual rotary cell jail used from 1938 to the 1970s. Putnam County has a World War II doodle bug or Buzz Bomb memorial to county residents who died in the war. As long as you heard buzzing, you were fine, but when it stopped it was coming down for you. Evansville has a structure about the size of a tool shed that four people lived in built by an apprentice to Frank Loyd Wright. There are still five structures from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair including the House of Tomorrow on the shores of Lake Michigan. Current occupants have leases with the U.S. Park Service rather than ownership.
Indiana State Hospital in Indianapolis closed its doors in 1955, but the on-campus pathology building reopened as the Indiana Medical History Museum in 1969 with all the original contents. The museum was endangered from deferred maintenance, but awareness was raised and it has been preserved.
The presentation by Suzanne Stanis presented a plethora of interesting historic sites to visit in Indiana that are being preserved by Indiana Landmarks.
Suzanne Stanis
