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>> BRANDON: Coming up.

>> ASHLEY: Step back in time at this unique Maritime museum.

>> BRANDON: Go for a spin in Indiana's roundabout capital.

>> ASHLEY: And learn how a Swiss clock tower ended up in Indiana.

>> BRANDON: That's all on this episode of -- >> TOGETHER: "Journey Indiana"!

♪ >> ASHLEY: Welcome to "Journey Indiana."

I'm Ashley Chilla.

>> BRANDON: And I'm Brandon Wentz.

And we're coming to you from the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site in Metamora.

The canal that runs through Metamora was once part of an important 19th century transportation system which carried goods up and down southeastern Indiana.

With the advent of railroads, the canal found a second life as a power source for gristmills, such as the one that still stands today.

And we'll learn all about this historic place in just a bit.

>> ASHLEY: But first, producer John Timm takes us to La Porte County, and steers us safely into port at the Old Lighthouse Museum.

♪ >> In the 1850s and '60s, this was a very busy commercial harbor.

A lot of lumber was brought down from Michigan and stored here, put on railroad cars and sent all over the Midwest.

And there was a lot of other supplies that were brought by ship.

♪ This is the only lighthouse in Indiana.

This building was built in the 1850s, 1858.

The light you see at the top was the light for the harbor here.

Now, some people say, well, there's other lighthouses in Indiana, but to be a lighthouse, the lighthouse keepers had to live where the lighthouse was, and the light was here and the lighthouse keepers lived here.

We now have a light at the end of our pier, and everyone calls it a lighthouse, but technically, it's a pierhead light because no one could live there.

It's an empty tin can with a light on top of it.

♪ So this is the only lighthouse in Indiana, and we preserved it.

It's owned by the city of Michigan City, and the Michigan City Historical Society owns the contents inside.

>> Welcome to the Old Lighthouse Museum.

This is a Fresnel lens that you would find in any lighthouse.

It is a fourth order.

Developed by a Frenchman in the 1830s.

He was commissioned by the French government to increase the light of a lighthouse.

Now, this is not a light you would use in a lighthouse, but if you look inside, see how small our bulb is?

If you step back, you can see how it expanded.

Put a large light in there, and it would shine 8 or 10 miles out into the lake.

Every lighthouse in the world has this shape of Fresnel lens.

The largest ones on the ocean, you can actually walk into.

♪ The first one was built in the 1840s, and it was just a wood building, and it survived one year, but the second year, it was blown down during a gale in the winter.

So they built in 1858 the stone structure you see here.

And the light was here until 1904.

In 1904, they had built the pier here in Michigan City, the cement pier, and they had put a pierhead light there.

And the light was moved from here out to the end of the pier.

And then from then on, this was used as a home for the lighthouse keepers, but they would have to walk out to the pierhead one.

♪ The most famous lighthouse keeper in this particular building was a woman.

Her name was Harriet Colfax.

She ran this place from 1861 at the start of the Civil War 'til 1904.

She was responsible for the light at the very top.

Then also at the mouth of the harbor here, there was a small wooden pier with a post and a lantern.

She'd have to walk out and light that lantern, and then walk back, row across to the other side, and on another small pier walk out and light another lantern.

So at night, if a ship came in, they would know where the opening was for the pier.

She was responsible for those three lights.

If during the night any three of those were burnt out, washed out, blown out, she had to go out and relight them.

In 1904, they moved the light from here out to the end of the pier.

And she was 80, and she decided it was time to retire.

She's the longest serving lighthouse keeper, male or female, in one spot.

And she was here for 43 years.

She was an amazing lady.

♪ The Old Lighthouse Museum was the home for lighthouse keepers from 1904 until late 1930s, early '41 or '42, during World War II, the Coast Guard took it over and the lighthouse keepers were let go.

And it set empty for '40s, the '50s.

When I was growing up, it was an empty building.

And finally, the city took it over and the Michigan City Historical Society was given permission to create a museum on the inside.

Now, it was in terrible shape.

It took about seven or eight years to finally get it ready to be used as a museum.

It was in 1973 when they finally were able to open it up.

And right now we're celebrating our 50th anniversary as a museum.

♪ >> This is what we call the navigation room.

Many of the lights you would find in a harbor and on boats and different equipment that is on ships are listed here.

Also we have pictures of what the harbor looked like about 1900 when it was a busy commercial harbor.

Over here is a display case about Washington Park.

It was an amusement park about 1900.

We had sometimes as many as 10,000 people.

♪ This we call the shipwreck room.

This is a map of all the wrecks at this end of Lake Michigan.

This is Michigan City here.

Chicago is over here.

You will notice there are a lot of them right here, and that's because Lake Michigan at this end has a lot of sandbars.

These are a lot of the artifacts that were picked up.

Most of it is metal because the wood does disappear.

Here's a painting of a famous sand dune.

It was called Hoosier Slide.

Here's some photographs of it.

It was over 200 feet tall.

It's not there anymore.

A sand company bought it and they hauled all the sand down to Muncie to make the Ball canning jar.

♪ Here is the actual lens that was in this building and later moved out to the pier.

It's very unusual because of the copper plate on one side, because the light would shine 8 or 10 miles out in the lake, and it also would shine 8 or 10 miles into Michigan City.

And the people at this end of town couldn't sleep at night because that light was burning all night.

We have recreated a bedroom and a parlor the way it would look about 1900 when Harriet lived here.

This would be the parlor.

This would be the stove that heats the area.

We have books that they could read at night.

You can use a stereopticon.

Also we have a pump organ that still plays.

Here is a bedroom.

Very old sewing machine, some dolls, a bed with a straw mattress and rope springs, if you want to call them springs.

♪ We'll go up to where the actual light was that Harriet lit for 43 years.

♪ We are now where Harriet would have had her light, the Fresnel lens here, and she would light it at night.

Now, where the spiral staircase is, for 43 years, she had a straight ladder she climbed every night.

♪ One of our mottos up here in this part of Indiana is there's more than corn in Indiana because we have beautiful sand dunes, a national park, a state park, the Old Lighthouse Museum.

♪ Again, this is the only lighthouse in Indiana.

So we tell people who tour, they visited all the lighthouses right now if they come here.

♪ It was made in 1858, and it's a part of Michigan City history.

♪ >> ASHLEY: So growing up in northwest Indiana, we would often go to Michigan City as, you know, part of school trips and all that.

And I do remember that we once went to a lighthouse there, and it was the first time I had ever been to a lighthouse, you know, we're not -- I mean, we have lakes up there, but it's not necessarily a water area.

And it was so beautiful, and it started sort of a lifetime love of water and also of lighthouses and I seek them out now.

[ Laughter ] Want to learn more?

Head to the address on your screen.

>> BRANDON: Earlier, we spoke with Joey Smith, the site manager here at the Whitewater Canal State Historic site to learn all about this 19th century marvel.

>> The Whitewater Canal State Historic site is 14 miles of canal that is maintained, interpreted, and taken care of by the Indiana State Museum.

The canal was built in 1836.

It took nine years to complete.

So it was completed in 1845.

The best way to think about canals and kind of why they were important, is to ask the question, why are highways important?

Because the canals were our highways in the 1830s and a little bit before.

Everything we do on the highways now, from getting goods from point A to point B, or getting things delivered to your house, the canal would be a big part of that.

One of the most important things you need to run a canal is going to be the dam, which allows you to control the flow of water that goes into the canal.

So if it rains a little bit too much the week before, and it's a little high, you can lower the amount of water that goes in the dam; or if it's been kind of a drought, you can increase the amount of water that goes into the dam.

But it allows us to control the flow.

So when a canal is made, there's a big trench dug into the ground, and the biggest thing that you need to know about canals is that they need to be level.

They can't go up a hill or down a hill because they are being pulled by two horses, two draft horses.

Since we needed to stay level, you couldn't go through the hill.

We couldn't dig through the hill or knock the hill down.

So what they'd do is create these things called locks.

I like to think of them as water elevators.

So what you do is you drive the boat into a lock, and it closes doors behind you, doors in front of you, and that lock either fills up with water to take you to the next level of water, or it drops down the water to bring you down to the next level of water.

And the other thing that you need to make a good canal or to make a canal work is an aqueduct.

And an aqueduct is the canal that goes over another body of water.

So it carries water over another body of water, which is actually a fantastic engineering feat, because there's so much weight with the water and with the boat that go in there, and it's awesome.

The canal days were short lived.

Basically, the introduction of the railroad killed the canals, and we can see that out there, the fact that the railroad is on our towpath.

A lot of the railroads were more efficient, cheaper, easier to get those goods.

They didn't rely on bodies of water.

Yeah, the government -- once railroads came out, they quickly defunded all of the canals and started putting money into the railroads.

Half of the canal boats went away and railroads became very popular and the main mode of transportation.

All these farmers still had a canal hanging out where they lived, and so they started using the canals as energy.

You can see mills popping up all up and down the canals that were created, and we're actually sitting in a gristmill that came about that harnessed the energy of moving water.

And in this specific mill, they did a lot of grinding of wheat and corn into meal or grist.

We think it's important to tell the story of the transportation history in Indiana, as well as just the history of Indiana, and the history of this wonderful town that we're in of Metamora, Indiana.

The canal is important.

The history is important, and it's very important to the people of this town.

♪ >> ASHLEY: Brandon, I don't know if you experienced this as well, but this little area sort of comes out of nowhere.

>> BRANDON: Yes!

>> ASHLEY: You are driving on country roads, you take a turn, you gotta slow down, and then all of a sudden this cute little town appears.

>> BRANDON: Yes, this little welcome back and all of these shops, yeah.

>> ASHLEY: Yes, it's very cute.

>> BRANDON: Want to learn more?

Just head to the address on your screen.

>> ASHLEY: Up next, producer Nick Deel takes us to Hamilton County to go round and round on Carmel's roundabouts.

>> Ah, one of our remaining stoplights.

This one's going to go away in a couple years.

Now, see this is the frustrating part.

Five cars have now gone through the light in the other direction, and we're sitting here.

Nobody else in sight.

We're -- you know, this is an electric car, but if it were a gasoline-powered car, we'd be sitting there burning fuel.

I really don't think we should be building stoplights.

I think the default should be a roundabout, and you should have to prove why a roundabout would not work or a stoplight would work better.

>> For 27 years now Jim Brainard has been waging a war against stoplights in his role as mayor of the city of Carmel a northern suburb of Indianapolis.

Over the course of his seven terms hes diligently worked to convince the city to install roundabouts instead of the color-coded traffic signals were all used to.

And hes been remarkably successful.

Today, 147 roundabouts dot the Carmel landscape, more than any other city in the United States, in a town of just over 100,000 residents.

>> I had been fortunate enough to go to graduate school in England, and they built a lot of roundabouts.

In fact, they invented what's called the modern roundabout back in the early 1960s.

I knew nothing about civil engineering or road building or road design, but I had driven on those in England.

I thought, these things work better than stoplights.

So after I was elected mayor, I called in one of our consulting engineers and asked him to build a roundabout.

His point of reference were the old traffic circles in New England called rotaries, or the Mid-Atlantic states, think Dupont Circle, Columbus Circle in New York.

The Indianapolis Circle would be an example of that.

And they're big, they are not angled when you go into them, and they are multilane.

And because they're big, people go faster inside of them, and they switch lanes inside of them.

And so these old-fashioned traffic circles were actually more dangerous than stoplights, And so we started to build the modern roundabouts.

One of the challenges we had in the very beginning Was explaining to the people who live here and drive here and have businesses here about how this works and why were doing it.

We worked witht the school drivers-ed teachers so they could teach young students how to drive through the roundabouts.

Our state bureau of motor vehicles eventually put a page about how to drive through roundabouts in the drivers manual that students and new drivers use to prepare for their driving test.

I went on every radio show and tv show I could to talk about why we were building roundabouts.

So we did a lot.

>> But how are modern roundabouts superior to traffic light intersections?

The key is in the design.

Gentle curves force drivers to slow down as they approach, calming traffic and creating a safe space for pedestrians to cross.

Incoming vehicles only need to yield to traffic already in the roundabout.

The lane markings help guide drivers to the exit of their choice.

If drivers make a mistake, they can just keep on going until they get it right.

And while it may seem counterintuitive, roundabouts improve overall traffic flow even as they slow down drivers.

>> The big thing, especially when you are replacing a four-way stop, every single vehicle coming to that intersection has to stop.

And so -- especially when you have imbalances in traffic, you may have one line of traffic that's 15 cars deep, and they're stopping for another line of traffic that just has a single car.

So that's where you start getting your efficiencies, is as the one car clears, now we can get a more steady flow of traffic.

This is a perfect example, that as this car approaches the roundabout, they slow down, yield and proceed through.

If the old stoplight was here, and they got stopped, they would have to stop and wait.

>> In the nearly three decades that Mayor Brainard has been in office, the population of Carmel has more than tripled.

The rate of serious traffic accidents, however has remained flat.

That, Mayor Brainard says, is due in large part to Carmel's roundabouts.

>> We're human.

We make errors.

There's a humor error rate, 1 out 1,000, 1 out of 10,000, whatever it is, there's going to be a crash from time to time.

The question is: Is that going to be a high-speed crash?

Is it going to be a T-bone or a sideswipe?

Is it going to be at 50 miles an hour or 15 miles an hour?

And that's what makes the difference.

Speed really does kill people.

>> There are environmental benefits as well.

By reducing traffic congestion, the city estimates that each roundabout saves around 24,000 gallons of fuel each year.

>> And time is important too.

It goes back to quality of life.

I've had constituents in Carmel tell me, you gave me back 15, 20 minutes, half an hour of my life every day because I can get to work 15 minutes faster, and I can get home 15 minutes faster because the roundabouts move traffic so much faster and more efficiently than the traffic lights do.

>> Mayor Brainard says the city saves about $400,000 at a new intersection by not installing a traffic signal, while retrofitting a traditional stoplight intersection can cost several million dollars.

Regardless, he says the positive knock-on effects are worth it.

>> So many times a mayor gets a call from a constituent saying, you've got to do something about traffic on this street or that street.

And the go-to answer, traditionally has been, widen the street, add more lanes to get more cars through that traffic light when it turns green.

All we're doing is building a bigger parking lot.

Paving over more land to get more cars through that traffic light.

But if we can put that same money into fixing the intersection, focused on intersection capacity, not lane capacity, we don't have to widen that street.

saves tons of money, allows more room in that right-of-way for a bike lane and sidewalks.

Maybe trees down the middle.

>> Mayor Brainard is stepping down at the end of his current term.

By then, there will be only a handful of stoplights left in the city.

And while he understands a new administration will bring about changes, he's confident a retreat from roundabouts will not be one of them.

>> And it's become a sense of pride for the people that live in Carmel.

We tried something new and different, and there's some risk to that.

It may not have worked.

As a result, we have one of the safest trans-- if not the safest transportation system of any city anywhere.

And it shows that if people come together as a community, and are willing to try new things, we can make great improvements in the quality of life.

>> BRANDON: How do you do with roundabouts?

>> ASHLEY: I love roundabouts.

I think they're so efficient.

>> BRANDON: Yeah, when I lived in Texas for a little bit, and that's what everything was, and I moved back here, and, you know, they started installing them.

I was like, oh, these are great, these are great, but people, they -- they kind of lose their minds when they see them.

[ Laughter ] >> ASHLEY: They do.

>> BRANDON: Yeah.

>> ASHLEY: And I know that when you are a visitor to Carmel, they can take you um -- they can take some people by surprise, but I think they're very efficient.

Want to learn more?

Head to the address on your screen.

>> BRANDON: Up next, producer Nick Deel takes us to Adams County to clock in at the Berne Clock Tower.

>> The Muensterberg Plaza and Clock Tower in the town of Berne is pretty hard to miss.

In fact, this prominent bit of architecture is almost transporting.

♪ >> Well, the tower is actually patterned after a tower in downtown Bern, Switzerland, old Bern, Switzerland.

It's not a replica, but it's very close.

>> Why would Berne build a Swiss clock tower, you ask?

>> The Berne community was settled in 1852 by Swiss immigrants that came directly from the canton of Bern, Switzerland, thus the name Berne, Indiana.

And in 2002, was our sesquicentennial.

We, in essence, threw ourselves a birthday party.

After that, the question lingered, and that was, is there something lasting that we could do and have from this party that we threw?

And it came up with the idea, why not a tower, not quite a replica, our own version of the clock tower in Bern, Switzerland, and put it right at the intersection of US-27 and Main Street.

>> But before construction could start, the town was going to need money.

And a lot of it.

>> We have a number of people, many people, who grew up in Berne, loved the Mayberry-esque life that they grew up in, but then moved on for college, for a career, but yet they wanted to give back to their community.

And so a lot of our money was -- was raised from those individuals.

And then people in Berne are just generous.

And so we were able to raise a little over $3.5 million toward this project.

All private funds.

>> Eight years after its conception, the Muensterberg Clock Tower and Plaza finally broke ground.

>> In the summer of 2010, the tower itself, the base, had been constructed.

It was constructed with 40 concrete panels that were precast elsewhere and brought on site.

But then the metal roof needed to be lifted into place by a crane.

Well, that was a spectacle.

And so people came from all around to watch that.

And it was quite an event.

It was -- it was pretty neat to see a lot of smiling faces and excited people that day.

>> Today, the site stands as a symbol of the future of Berne, while still celebrating its unique history and heritage.

>> Over in this area, we have the Settlers Monument.

When they came here, they drained the swamps, and they cut the timber to clear the land for people who live here today.

Over in this area, we have the canton tree, that shows all of the cantons, the Swiss states of Switzerland.

Berne stands for bear.

So we have a bear statue over there that a lot of children climb on to get their pictures taken.

>> And what Swiss clock tower would be complete without a glockenspiel?

>> Three times a day, the glockenspiel comes out and tells the story of Berne.

There are 12 characters that are about 5 and a half feet tall, and they represent some part of Berne.

♪ >> Well, we wanted a community gathering space, for one thing, and this has become that.

The way that the tower is built, is there's a stage on this side of it, and a large open space.

So we have concerts here.

It's been a gathering space for all kinds of things.

What's interesting to me is the number of children we now have who don't remember it without this being here.

And before very long, there are going to be multiple generations that will never remember Berne without this plaza and this tower.

That's pretty cool.

♪ >> BRANDON: Want to learn more?

Head to the address on your screen.

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

>> ASHLEY: 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.

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

>> ASHLEY: All right.

Here goes nothing.

>> BRANDON: All right.

So this is gonna take a little bit to run.

So why don't you take this opportunity to mill around.

>> Production support for "Journey Indiana" is provided by WTIU members.

Thank you!