Edge of the World

I grew up in a world very different from the world today. So much has changed, but here and there are reminders of those days of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of those places is where US 40, the old National Road, has a junction with Indiana 103 at Lewisville, Indiana. This is what I saw there looking west on the afternoon of December 20, 2023.

When I was six, we moved away from my original hometown of New Castle, Indiana, deep in the heart of Henry County, Indiana. We went to a tiny town in Randolph County where we spent the second half of 1959. My brothers attended the old brick school at Parker City, Indiana and I went to the first half of kindergarten at a newer elementary school nearby. From there we moved to a rented house in Richmond, Indiana, then to a boy’s wonderland outside the city limits with woods and a creek and a swamp.

We moved away from New Castle, but left both sets of grandparents, still living, behind. Other relatives were abundant there, particularly from my dad’s side of the family. Of my mother’s three sisters, we were the last family to leave for greener pastures. Naturally, there were many occasions to return to New Castle over the years.

There were two main routes from Richmond back to the old home town. One was across Richmond on North A Street to NW 5^th Street to the place where Indiana 38 and US 35 split on the northwest side of town. From there we would follow Indiana 38 through Greens Fork and Hagerstown, past Millville, and on to New Castle.

The other main route took us across the south side of Richmond across the river on the G Street bridge past the high school to the National Road, US 40, just after it crossed the river and made a jog to go past Earlham College and on to points west. From our house it was only 9 miles to the first town, Centerville. Old Federal style brick houses and store buildings crowded both sides of the National Road there. Jody’s Restaurant stood on a corner of the main intersection and everything about the town reeked of the really olden days. If I looked at the right time, I could see the brick Federal house that had been the home of Oliver P. Morton, the Civil War governor I would later come to revere. Even as a kid I could read the marker standing on the National Road and I knew there was something important about the place. The streets were tree lined, sugar maples and elms if I recall, and everything was neat and quaint and old-timey.

West of Centerville the landscape looked the way landscapes look when they’re perfectly arranged in my memory. Beautiful gently rolling farm land heavy with corn, soybeans, wheat, hogs, and cattle spread out before me as I gazed at it all through the windows of our ’58 Plymouth wagon. Well-kept farmhouses and barns dotted the view along with fenced patches of beech, maple, and white oak woods just often enough to comfort the eye. Creeks drained the glacial sandy loam soil at perfect intervals. Stock tanks and windmills were scattered here and there, reminding one of Currier and Ives or Grandma Moses. In my mind it was idyllic.

Beyond Centerville lay Pennville, then East Germantown. In the days I first remember it, this latter place was named Pershing. In the 1960s and 1970s, certain locals began to express their resentment over the town having the name of the commander of the American Expeditionary Force during the Great War. I thought it was a grand thing, because Pershing was the CO to my paternal grandfather who had served in France under him. I was fine with it. Duh. Lots better than East Germantown, especially after that problem in the 1930s and 1940s! In the haste to Americanize all things not already Americanized during World War I, the name had been changed to Pershing to avoid the odium of having been named after the largest ethnic group in the US, or the Kaiser! When feathers began to be smoothed and things began to be a bit calmer in the 1960s, the old timey Krauts got the name switched back to East Germantown. Eventually they took the Pershing name off the sign, too. Whatever.

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Pershing was always a highlight of the trip for me. There was a stand there called Roy’s Highway Market. I don’t think we ever stopped, but I remember anticipating the place in the fall when there would be pumpkins and squash and Indian corn along with bundled corn shocks in front of the gray building. How good it must have smelled inside with apples and cider and jams and jellies and everything that made fall my favorite time of the year. There was always a permanent sign near the market announcing that someone there raised Champagne D’Argent rabbits. Whoa. With a name like that, they must be the royalty of the rabbit world. As it turned out, they were beautiful, large silver gray rabbits of gentle disposition. I raised some myself in later years.

In towns like Centerville and Pershing and Lewisville I could always smell the tangy smoke from burning leaves. Bare limbs above meant that winter was coming on. Jackets and hats were the order of the day. Safe inside our heavy car without seat belts, the world was just outside, a visual feast.

Before we reached Cambridge City, there was a silver steel bridge over the National Road with three openings. Two were large, one conducting the westbound lanes of US 40 and the other carrying the eastbound lanes. Just to the north of these was a smaller opening, less than half the width of the large ones. It was gravelled, but had obviously been unused for many years. On one of these trips I asked my dad what that opening was for. He immediately replied that that was the bridge under the railroad for the interurban cars that ran alongside the old National Road. Interurbans were the alternative to railroad passenger service before there were major bus lines. My dad had ridden on them as a kid. Huh. Interesting!

Then it was on to Cambridge City. Still bustling then, it was loaded with Federal brick buildings from the early days and castles of Roman brick from the 1880s and 1890s. I learned to look at just the right place to see where the Whitewater Canal had crossed the National Road starting in the 1830s! Low-slung canal boats with boat boys encouraging the mules had passed right through this very place! The canal ran from Hagerstown south through Cambridge City to Metamora and on to the Ohio River. Imagine! My dad’s crazy cousin lived there and had an antique shop on the National Road. My dad would point these places out as we passed through.

On the west edge of Cambridge City was Mt. Auburn. Vast greenhouses sat on the north side of the highway there, and just ahead on the left was the Federal style brick Huddleston House with its grand three-level façade facing north just at the edge of the National Road. It seemed ever so palatial and proud every time we passed it. It had been built perhaps ten years after Indiana became a state, standing witness to the westward movement of our pioneer ancestors. Oxen had pulled covered wagons along this very road and past this building for decades before the Civil War. It was humbling and awe-inspiring.

We went through Dublin, where my grandmother went to the doctor’s office, then Straughn, then on to Lewisville. It seemed as though every vista was memorable.

Lewisville was where we turned north onto Indiana 103. Nine miles north was the farm where my paternal grandparents lived. I was always in the back seat, of course, and it seemed like I was always on the left side behind my dad, the driver. There was a chip in the windshield in front of the driver. It was in the perfect place for me to imagine it was a gunsight in front of the canopy on my P-51. I could place myself to aim straight ahead into the westbound lane ahead of us, or I could hold to my right and strafe the oncoming traffic in the eastbound lane. The six fifty caliber machine guns made the Mustang shiver, but I braced my elbows on the sides of the cockpit like Don Gentile had done so I could deliver perfect fire every time. I couldn’t be making machine gun noise in my dad’s ear, of course, so I had to provide these sounds in my imagination. Somehow there was always plenty of ammunition beyond the whole nine yards. In my mind the road behind us was littered with burning German army trucks and fighter aircraft, smoke rising to mark where we had been. East Germantown was always particularly hard hit, as I recall.

We went down into the little valley in Lewisville, then up a rise to the blinker light. That’s where we turned north onto what my grandfather always called ‘hundred-and-three.’ On the left side of the car in the back seat, my final view of the National Road was off to the west toward, well, that’s the point of my story. For at least a couple of years of making the trip west along US 40, I looked out the window as we turned. There’s a rise in the highway on the edge of Lewisville, then a bit further on there is another hill that is the western horizon. Beyond that point is only sky. Somehow the idea entered my mind, when I began to speculate about such things, that there being nothing beyond that rise, it would about have to be the edge of the world. I never saw cars or trucks topping the rise out there, and who would keep going westbound there? Nobody in their right mind would want to drive off the edge of the world into. . . what would even be there? The ocean? Space? I didn’t know what was there and I had no interest in finding out, especially if it was the ocean. No, thanks.

I was always content and a bit relieved that we did not go over the edge of the world, but would trek a few miles north along hundred-and-three to the farm that was our destination. In my recollection it remains one of the happiest places I ever knew. The big burr oak is still there in the lower hayfield. In my memory it is always green and there are fuzzy brown acorns scattered on the ground. I go there in my memory quite often, but I’m never tempted go west of Lewisville to peek over the edge of the world.

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