iana" is provided by Columbus Visitors Center, celebrating everywhere art and unexpected architecture in Columbus, Indiana.

Tickets for guided tours and trip planning information at Columbus.in.us.

And by WTIU members.

Thank you!

>> BRANDON: Coming up, travel to Oolitic to learn the history behind the town's iconic Joe Palooka statue.

Meet the duo behind Haptik B, and see their recent project in Bartholomew County.

And hear the story behind an incredible collection of historic photographs.

That's all on this episode of "Journey Indiana"!

♪ Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Brandon Wentz, and we're coming to you from Woolery Mill in Monroe County.

Built nearly a century ago by the Woolery Stone Company, this facility manufactured dimensional limestone for decades.

In 2002, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today, Woolery Mill is an event space with a banquet hall, industrial kitchen, and expansive outdoor patios.

And we'll learn more about this historic place and its new lease on life in just a bit.

But first, we're headed just south to Lawrence County where producer Jake Lindsay has the story behind the statue.

♪ >> Deep in the heart of South Central Indiana sits the tiny hamlet of Oolitic.

It is here where you'll find a peculiar statue to a forgotten legend.

♪ A champion of democracy and the ring.

A victor from yesteryear.

Who faded from memory generations ago.

♪ A hero named Joe Palooka.

♪ >> Joe Palooka was the creation of a man named Ham Fisher.

He was a cartoonist, and he created this -- not exactly a superhero, because he didn't have superpowers, but he was like a super patriot and a super good guy.

You know, he beat up bad guys, and he was a boxer.

So he created this guy 1921.

And the comic strip that he created from this character launched in 1930, and grew really fast in syndication.

At its peak, it was, like, in 900 newspapers.

So people were very familiar with him.

He came right into their living room, even if they didn't have, you know, a TV or if they didn't go to the movies, which by the way, there were lots of movies.

There was merchandise.

>> Through the 1930s, Joe's popularity continued to rise.

But a new reality would soon come to Joe and millions of others.

Before the U.S. entered the Second World War, some Americans signed up to be part of the French Foreign Legion and help fight the Nazis.

Among them, Joe Palooka.

During these dark years, readers found levity in the character, even a cameo from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

♪ Joe's significance in U.S. pop culture was undeniable, as was limestone's importance to Bedford.

>> It jetted from hillsides and formed caves in streambeds throughout the region.

Indiana limestone is found in a belt of rock that runs across the south central part of the state.

The source of prime limestone in the Salem formation is shaped roughly like a capital L, and extends from the area around the town of Bedford in the south, northward right under the city of Bloomington and the campus of Indiana University, and ends near the village of Stinesville in the north.

Stone from this deep quarry was shipped 1,000 miles to New York City, to become the Empire State Building.

Out of the old quarries in Dark Hollow came the blocks of stone that were shipped by rail to the mountains of North Carolina, to be carved into the magnificent turn-of-the-century chateau of George Vanderbilt, the Biltmore house.

>> 1948, marked the 100th anniversary of the limestone industry in Bedford.

A monumental event that sparked the creation of an unusual monument.

>> The carvers -- it was Harry Easton and a fellow named George Hitchcock.

The carvers, at least somewhat worked on the statue in public.

That was something that got the public engaged in the project.

It was unveiled there.

There were 4,500 people who came to the unveiling, including Ham Fisher.

On September 5th, 1948, the character of Joe Palooka was returning home on a plane, and he made a detour to come to Bedford and see the statue.

It was placed in a beautiful, perfect location that was a perfect location, except for one thing.

There was nobody there most of the time, and it was way too convenient to vandals and vandalism.

And so poor Joe -- poor Joe just got abused.

And by 1952, they pulled Joe off his pedestal and took him back to McMillen Mill, to what they called Joe Palooka Hospital, then pretty badly damaged.

Federal Order of Police got the part, and Joe Palooka was still up there.

I think people were hoping with more police in the park, there would be less vandalism, but that, in fact, did not work out.

By 1984, his condition was pretty dire.

And they had to add, like, a nose and part of his ear, and he was pock marked with bullet holes.

Like, yeah, I mean, evidently nobody ever noticed anything going on at that park.

The newly formed Oolitic Kiwanis Club decided to fix this.

So they fixed him back up again and put him in front of city hall in Oolitic.

And he seems to have been able to survive there for almost 40 years relatively unmolested.

You know, that's a long time for a statue that was basically out in the wild for most of its life.

It's really beautiful work.

It's a strange -- you know, it's a strange sort of character.

It's definitely from a different time.

He was a cultural phenomenon, and one that at the time probably seemed timeless and really important.

Like, they could not know that by 2022 the Joe Palooka statue would be more famous than Joe Palooka.

>> BRANDON: I've been reading comics my whole life.

I still do to this day.

It would have been really fascinating to have been around when those comics were coming out, to see a character transition through something that you were dealing with in everyday life.

Want to learn more about the Joe Palooka statue and everything else Lawrence County?

Just head over to lawrencecountyhistory.org.

Earlier, we caught up with Randy Cassady to learn all about the Woolery Mill.

>> This actually was one of the Woolery Mill's first quarries.

The original mill was down at Dillman Road, and they had a train track that came down here to the quarry.

When it came time that that one needed updated, they made the decision to come and build it on their quarry.

So you were still 8 feet down before the bed where they had quarried everything out, and then they started bringing the rubble in.

And then as you will notice, they just used what they had, limestone blocks to build the foundation up.

This building actually was a teardown from Chicago that they brought in.

And they had enough building as they progressed on in sections, they built on back to the back, using just concrete instead of the limestone blocks.

So Henry and Charles Woolery who started it, they came up here and built the mill.

They owned everything from Rockport Road, all the way through.

And as they closed the mill, and then started selling off the land, this was the last remaining 26 acres.

In 2002, we looked at what it was, and thought, you know what, this is one of the few ones that are here.

Let's save it.

So we made the decision, let's get a National Historic Register on this.

We may not always be here, but if we got it designated, then our structure and the baseline that people could see the history of our community, and it kind of grounds them into a sense of community and pride.

We went through, renovated the office building, made that our office.

In 2017, you know, that's when we started the events center with the functions and the quality food and the environment.

"Breaking Away" was filmed here.

From the historic standpoint, as we are looking and trying to identify some of the artifacts and such that are here to preserve, we went back to the movie multiple times to say, okay, where was that?

What was this?

And there was a persimmon tree on the corner.

And, of course, in the movie as he comes around, there's stones and everything, and there's this little persimmon tree which now bears fruit on a yearly basis.

Love for people to always come and celebrate the heritage of southern Indiana, the stone, and what it's done too.

We're here because -- and took care of it because we couldn't let things that are that important just fall away, you know?

Bloomington is a special place, and we always want to keep it that way.

>> BRANDON: Driving in, this was a really fascinating space to see, and I'm excited to see what it becomes in the next 5 to 10 years.

And you can learn more at oneworldatwoolery.com.

Up next, producer Adam Carroll introduces us to the design duo known as Haptik B.

♪ >> Jei Kim grew up in Seoul, Korea, a big city that helped inspire her career in architecture and design.

Dorian Bybee grew up in the Midwest, equally inspired by his surroundings, he pursued a similar path.

Together, they formed the design firm Haptik B, to bring all of their inspirations to life.

>> We worked in just about every kind of team environment you can imagine.

So by the time we started working together on our own work, we had kind of seen the gamut of different opportunities and ways you can work.

And we actually don't focus on one way.

We kind of are reactive.

We have to deal with what the project presents us, and then we just kind of make our best -- do the best we can with what we are presented.

>> Yes, it's like trained as architects, we always educated to be team collaborators.

We are kind of accustomed to share the thoughts and brainstorm together and revise together.

So we are -- we think it's a great team.

You know, there are some things that I could not do as much as he could do.

So we kind of balance out our work together.

When we have a project to start with, we think about the concept first.

You know, ideation.

We always start with the brainstorming, conceptualizing.

We are heavily using digital modeling, digital working, any kind of method.

So sometimes we kind of split, you know, those works.

But most of the time, we kind of back and forth between collaborative thoughts, ideation, and back to revision and back and forth.

>> It's interesting because there's good and bad side when we come together.

Sometimes we start to come up with the same idea, and then it's like, oh, that means it's a good idea.

Or sometimes like, wait, if we both have that idea, maybe we should find some other opportunity there.

It's not just a collaboration between ourselves.

It's actually -- there also a degree of collaboration literally in the project we're working on currently, but a little more figuratively other times between our kind of professional work and academic work.

Because there's so much that you learn through teaching.

>> The pair's latest project, one that finds them working in Bartholomew County as part of the Exhibit Columbus program, brings together their academic interests and their professional pursuits.

LaWaSo Ground combines renderings of land, soil, and water to tell the story of the Midwest's Indigenous cultures, and to advocate for their increased inclusion.

The key element, Indiana limestone.

♪ >> So we have been calling it LaWaSo Ground, which is the communal ground for those three elements, which is connected to those material cultures.

Again, land we are calling it through this land of limestone, or the limestone deposit that is embedded into the land.

People who started excavating to really bring the nation, you know, the whole nation of America for 200 years.

They utilized the material.

More than 80% of all limestone production over this small, narrow band of deep stone deposit has been used a lot for building the nation.

So we have been kind of conceptualizing the material as kind of symbolically or referring to American colonial culture.

And then the other one, soil, we are thinking of going really past to these Native Americans, Indians culture of making this land form, that it's mimicking land of, like, rolling hills.

So we kind of tried to synthesize these two different polemic ideas of land and soil, putting together into one site.

>> Those three elements are separate, but they are all very related.

There's a system involved, and one can become the other, or at least there's a very intimate kind of relationship between them.

In that same sense, as we looked at the cultures and the histories involved, we found a way that hopefully we can express the relationships between things, allowing them to be unique and separate, but not having to be separated.

Stone, along with wood and some other materials, are considered primitive in the sense that human beings have been using them pretty much forever.

In the case of Indiana limestone, the reason it's been utilized around the country is because it's this nice blend between hard and soft.

So it's hard enough to be durable.

It lasts quite a while.

It's soft enough to be able to put a really fine detail into it.

The stone gives us an opportunity to connect to the community and the history involved.

♪ >> For this duo, connection is key.

Jei and Dorian have worked all over the world, from Beijing to Portugal to New York, but a recent project allowed the pair to work a little closer to home.

>> One that was working very well was the bicentennial medal that we designed a couple of years ago for -- to celebrate the bicentennial history of Indiana University.

For that project, it was -- it was different process because it was a medal, you know and that it's metal, you know.

As an architect, we really understand things more spatially, and then looking at the maps and location, kind of showing the physical connectivity of all those I.U.-related campuses, including medical and academic campuses in Indiana.

So we wanted to show the interconnectiveness of those campuses in kind of three-dimensional mapping and how they are located and how they are connected through the arcs and how they are trajectory out towards the nation and globally.

>> The future for Jei and Dorian lies at the intersection between cutting-edge digital fabrication and classic materials, like Indiana limestone.

There, they hope to find a middle ground between design and culture, and bring a global focus to local work.

>> As we move forward, we are really interested in occupying that space between these different kinds of elements and finding those kinds of potentials that exist where, to a certain extent, people have gravitated to one end or the other.

You know, we are kind of looking -- we're exploring the new middles, the old middles.

>> Yes.

>> The in between spaces.

♪ >> BRANDON: You know, when we are out shooting the show, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes that you don't see, where everybody has got their jobs, and they are lending in and they are helping.

And it was really fascinating to see this art being made with all of those people getting involved, almost climbing on top of each other to create this shared vision.

Planning for the next Exhibit Columbus just got underway and will culminate with an exhibit in the fall of 2023.

You can get all the info at exhibitcolumbus.org.

And finally, we're right back here in limestone country where producer Jason Pear has the story of a stunning set of photos shedding the light on the state's early limestone industry.

♪ >> The Indiana stone belt is a fairly small geographic region where all of what we call Indiana limestone is quarried from.

It stretches from just the toe of Owen County, down through Monroe, Lawrence, and into Washington County.

And from this roughly 30 by 10-mile wide region, we have supplied up to 75% of all limestone buildings in North America.

Most of downtown Bloomington and Bedford are made up of Salem or Indiana Limestone, but some of the largest, most impressive pieces of our American architecture are also made of Salem Limestone.

Large portions of downtown Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C., the National Cathedral, the Pentagon, 35 of our 50 state capitols, all of these things are made out of Indiana Limestone.

The availability of its width, the even size and texture, and its softness make it the best building stone in the world.

It's actually trademarked, the nation's building stone.

The Indiana Limestone Photograph Collection is roughly 26,000 high-quality architectural black and white photographs that were on the property of the Indiana Limestone Company.

The collection spans almost every state, also has some photos from Canada, and it shows the entire process of the limestone industry.

They used it as a marketing tool to show how much their stone could be used and the different applications it was used for.

It's a pretty tremendous collection, and we are working our way through it, putting it online for the public to see.

>> The first part of the process is to go through each of the boxes of photographs physically, and put them into a sensible order.

They are cataloged by state, and then eventually we will be cataloging them by city as well.

And from there, we select whichever image is the best of the duplicates that we have, because that is something that we run into, especially the larger cities, is that there are multiple copies of each photo.

They were being utilized as an advertisement material.

So the salesmen would have a booklet of photos, and go out into the field and say, we can do this kind of thing for you for your building.

But for our side of things, that results in a lot of duplication of photos.

So we go through and we make sure whichever photo we choose is the cleanest it can be, before we do a cleaning process on it.

Then we scan it into what can be found online.

♪ >> My favorite image is from the Dark Hollow Quarry, which is in Bedford.

It is around the 1870s, and that's when steam-powered technology came to the Indiana stone belt.

Before, you had to use a star drill and a hammer to hit the stone over and over to break out small pieces of stone.

When we got steam-powered technology, suddenly, you could have a machine chisel out those large blocks of stone at a much faster rate than any human could.

And so in this picture, you see steam engine tracks on the bottom of this quarry.

It's black.

It's sooty.

It's dusty, because the steam engines are powered by coal, and you have these rugged characters who are there in the front, showing off the work that they do.

♪ And you can zoom in.

The pictures are really high quality.

So you can zoom in and see the background, all of the ledges that they quarried as they worked their way down farther and farther into the limestone, and you can see train cars in the distance.

And it just looks like another world.

You wouldn't imagine that being here in the hills of southern Indiana.

I think it's a really neat image, both showing the cultural impact of these workers, but then the technology that brought about change in the industry.

>> In 1926, the Indiana Limestone Company was formed from an amalgamation of 26 different companies, and these photos that we have are records from all 26 of those companies that were brought together.

The information that's found on the back of the photos are layered.

So as the companies joined together, they would stick a different label on the back of it.

So we have layers of information.

But to have information from such an early time period when they were quarrying is -- is a great resource.

>> We have one tremendous photo of workers who are lined up on a column that was quarried in Bedford, and we didn't know who all of them were.

A large part of these photographs, maybe the architect is named and the photographer, but the workers themselves are usually not listed on the meta data.

♪ >> We were able to source that information through different historic records, through historical societies, through folks who have a family legacy.

So it's not impossible to find that information.

It's more challenging, but that's kind of a fun part of the puzzle.

♪ It's just an amazing suite of materials.

It makes the history of the geology of an area much more accessible.

Explore it for yourselves.

See what resonates with you.

I think anybody could approach this collection and find something that would interest them.

If you are interested in architecture, there's something there for you.

If you are interested in genealogy and family history, there's connections to that.

And then, of course, Indiana's impact on the nation that ties us to so many different stories, and there's something for everyone.

>> BRANDON: I think this is a great story because for all of you out there, who are makers and builders, you never know what you stick back that someone might end up wanting to make a whole museum about.

If you would like to check out the collection for yourself, and you really should, just head over to the address on the screen.

And always, we'd like to encourage you to stay connected with us.

Just head over to JourneyIndiana.org.

There you can see full episodes, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, and suggest stories from your neck of the woods.

We also have a map feature that allows you to see where we've been, and to plan your own Indiana adventures.

And before we say good-bye, let's spend a bit of time exploring the still active limestone quarries near Woolery Mill.

♪ >> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by Columbus Visitors Center, celebrating everywhere art and unexpected architecture in Columbus, Indiana.

Tickets for guided tours and trip planning information at Columbus.in.us.

And by WTIU members.

Thank you!