♪ >> Today on "Journey Indiana," we're exploring the Covered Bridge Capital of the World, Parke County.

Check out their iconic festival.

>> I think it's important that people understand our history here in Parke County and how proud we are of our history.

>> I do too, and the food.

>> And the food.

>> Meet a pioneering conservationist.

>> She set in motion a state park that's still being enjoyed by Hoosiers and people from all over the country.

>> Step into a bygone era.

>> This really gives us a beautiful snapshot of what milling was like at the end of the 1800s, on a local level, what that industrialization was really like.

>> And hear the story of a thrilling and deadly pastime.

>> Even for a racetrack in the '30s, it was dangerous.

There were trees around it.

>> That's all on this episode of "Journey Indiana."

♪ >> First, we're headed to the annual Parke County Covered Bridge Festival to get the lay of the land.

If Parke County is known for one thing, it's their covered bridges.

There are 31 of these historic structures dotting the landscape of this small rural county.

More than any other county in the United States, earning Parke County the distinction of the covered bridge capital of the world.

And for more than 70 years, the Covered Bridge Festival has drawn big crowds.

Folks come out in droves to shop, eat funky food, check out local arts and crafts, and admire these iconic bridges.

The first covered bridge in Parke County was built in 1856.

And at one point, there were as many as 53 of them across the county.

They needed all of these bridges to navigate a landscape that was rutted by massive glaciers in the last Ice Age.

>> And as the glaciers traveled south, into our area, the glaciers were acting like bulldozers.

They were pushing mounds and mounds of debris.

And those glaciers began to recede.

They just left those piles of dirt.

That's where we are.

It's called a terminal or the end, the terminal moraine.

So as a result, we have these big mounds.

Between those mounds, the valleys, we have just hundreds and hundreds of creeks and little rivers.

Most of them were built alongside mills, because otherwise if you would have just had a mill that built along a low spot in the creek, you could only travel that certain times of the year, when the water was down.

It was really important for those towns to have access across the creek all year long.

And as a result then, there was a mill, and then typically came a bridge, and then typically the towns began to grow up around that because people could get there and do their economic activity every day.

>> The bridges were so important to the local economy, they covered them to keep the structures safe and dry.

>> If you had all of this wood exposed to the elements, it's gonna rot a lot quicker.

They certainly wouldn't last 150 years.

>> Those covered bridges have survived maybe because it wasn't a very rich county.

And so we didn't tear them down, as new technology came for new concrete and steel bridges, we didn't tear down perfectly good bridges 150 years ago.

We kept them going.

It's really important to us, it's important to most people, and it allowed Parke County to grow into what it is today.

>> Today, the Covered Bridge Festival is an epic celebration of the bridges and Parke County that brings people back year after year.

>> We expect about 2 million people to come into our county for the ten-day festival.

And it's -- it's very exciting because you see people come back year after year.

This is now a tradition with their family.

>> We come every year.

It's so much fun.

Good to see people.

Come back to the same shops and greet some people, and it's a really fun time.

>> Ever since I was young, I've been coming here, kind of watching it grow.

I try to make a yearly tradition of it, come home for the festival.

I like seeing all the handmade stuff, you know.

>> Oh, gosh, it's a must-have to go around to all the shops, the little ma and pop places, and people that you haven't seen and little handcrafted items that you can't get anywhere else.

>> Starting on the second Friday in October, artists, woodworkers and crafters fan out across nine different towns to sell their goods and display their art.

Many of these artists and craftspeople are staples of the long-running festival, like Blaine Berry, who has been coming here for year to show off his work and demonstrate his process.

>> I do it pretty much basically the same way they did back those days.

The main thing I do is old-style Windsor chairs.

I do stuff from the late 1700s to the early 1800s.

>> And Berry's work has caught the eye of the experts at the Smithsonian, where this chair will be on display starting next summer.

Many of the artists whose work you see at the festival are from right here in Parke County, like painter Lynne Dunnavant.

>> When I come to the bridges, I feel like I'm home because it's just part of my life and my history.

>> She paints a number of different subjects, but she always seems to return to the covered bridges, a passion that she has shared with the folks who flock to the festival every year.

>> And a lot of times I think why people are drawn to them and like them, because when they come back for the festival, they may say, oh, I remember this bridge!

And I grew up here.

They like to buy the bridges because they lived it also, and it's a memory for them.

>> Dunnavant's work is shown at the Covered Bridge Art Gallery in Rockville, alongside bridge paintings by many other local artists.

>> We have so many great artists in our county, and some of the members have been doing art since the festival started.

>> The paintings at the gallery, just like the bridges themselves, are windows to the past that help folks in Parke County tell their story in bright, vivid colors.

>> So I think it's important that people understand our history here in Parke County and how proud we are of our history.

>> I do too.

I do too.

They like learning about it too.

>> I think so too.

>> And the food.

>> And the food.

♪ Now, let's head to Turkey Run State Park.

Here we'll learn about conservationist Juliet Strauss and her efforts to preserve this awe-inspiring corner of Indiana.

♪ Each year, thousands of tourists flock to one of the most scenic places in Indiana, Turkey Run State Park.

More than a century ago, however, corporate interests threatened to cut down this Parke County paradise, and most likely would have succeeded if it were not for the efforts of an intrepid journalist and environmentalist from Rockville, Juliet Strauss.

>> And Juliet always was very self-reliant.

She was blazing new trails in journalism.

Very outspoken in what she believed in.

Rockville was a small town on the western frontier of Indiana when Juliet was born there in 1863.

>> She had a real talent for writing.

In fact, so much so that other students at school, when they needed help with their essays, would go to Juliet and ask her to spice up their own writing.

♪ >> The wilderness around Rockville was like a second home for Juliet, and she often wrote of the natural beauty that surrounded her in Parke County.

>> Her compositions, came to the knowledge of the editor of the Rockville Tribune Newspaper, John Beadle.

He went to her mother, said that, you know, your daughter has a real talent for writing.

She should be encouraged to do so, and I'd be happy to have her do some compositions for the newspaper, and that's how she got her start.

>> As she began to write for the newspaper, Juliet met Isaac Strauss, the typesetting and press operator.

The two fell in love and married in 1881.

Soon, Juliet was working side by side with her husband, to publish the weekly Rockville Tribune.

>> It really came to fore in 1893, when she started a regular weekly column called "Squibs and Sayings" that she produced for the rest of her life.

It was featured only page one of the Tribune every week.

Later, her work drew the attention of the editors at the Indianapolis News, and they offered her a weekly column in her own right.

>> At the time, the Indianapolis News was one of the most highly respected and widely read newspapers in the state.

Writing under the heading "The Country Contributor," Juliet Strauss became one of the most popular journalists in Indiana.

>> Later on, that column caught the attention of a national editor, Edward Bok of the Ladies' Home Journal, which was the magazine for women in the late 19th, early 20th century and had over 1 million subscribers.

And so her audience broadened to the whole country.

>> By 1915, the very lands that inspired Strauss were under threat from timber companies that wanted to clearcut the forests.

>> From a young age, Juliet loved going out into lush forests that were in Parke County.

And she felt that this spot needed to be preserved, for all time, for future generations to enjoy, as she did from a young age.

>> When Strauss learned that an Indianapolis lumber company was attempting to purchase these lands at auction, she mobilized to save the area.

As a journalist, she had known Indiana Governor Samuel Ralston and sent him letters promoting wildlife conservation.

She also joined forces with a powerful ally, Richard Lieber, who was currently campaigning to create a new state park system.

>> They were both very supportive of saving Turkey Run from these timber companies.

And a commission was established by the state centennial commission to help save Turkey Run.

>> The commission raised more than $30,000 to purchase the land.

But in a sudden move at auction, the timber company outbid Strauss and Lieber by $100.

>> The auctioneer banged his gavel, and it seemed the death knell had sounded for Turkey Run.

But Lieber and Strauss did not give up.

They decided to keep on fighting on behalf of the land.

>> Strauss went to work immediately using her connections with lawmakers and several wealthy donors.

Together with Richard Lieber's influence, Strauss was able to raise an additional $10,000 to buyout the timber companies and save the land.

Today, in the heart of Turkey Run State Park, a statue stands in tribute to Juliet Strauss, for her efforts to preserve this wooded temple to nature.

>> She set in motion a state park that's still being enjoyed by Hoosiers and people from all over the country, who visit it today, enjoy the recreation opportunities of hiking, going through the trails and communing with nature.

>> I think she would be proud of the fact that she left something behind in Turkey Run that generations down the road will enjoy for a long, long time.

>> Next, we're headed to the historic Mansfield Roller Mill to learn the ins and outs of an early Parke County industry.

♪ >> Perched on the edge of Raccoon Creek, in central west Parke County sits the historic Mansfield Roller Mill.

♪ It may not look like much now, but at the turn of the 20th century, this was a state-of-the-art facility, and a linchpin of the local economy.

Today, it's maintained by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources as a prime example of Indiana's early industrial economy.

>> This really gives us a beautiful snapshot of what milling was like at the end of the 1800s.

Critical point in American history was sort of the final full-on into industrialization that the country kind of went, and this really shows on a local level what that industrialization was really like.

I think most people think of big steel mills, giant factories and big cities, and Indiana was industrialized very much on a small town basis first.

>> Jacob Rohm, a successful local miller, purchased this parcel of land in 1875.

He quickly tore down an older, less efficient mill built in 1819.

>> The first mill that was here in 1819, it utilized a tub wheel.

So that's a sideways waterwheel, and immediately on top of that was the stones.

It was a very labor intensive job.

You had to shovel and carry everything on a bag over your shoulder.

A day's worth of grinding here would have probably been several weeks worth of grinding in that old mill.

Rohm sought success through efficiency as he built his new mill on the banks of Raccoon Creek.

>> Jacob Rohm, who owned several other steam-powered mills, saw this as an opportunity to basically get a free power source for his mill, which meant that he could take risks that he couldn't at his steam-powered mills.

There was a significant amount of new technologies and ideas that had flooded into the milling industry and market.

And Jacob Rohm saw those, and he wanted this to be a proving ground at least for himself.

♪ >> Rohm's first big change was to replace age-old stone grinders with precision steel rollers.

>> We call it one of the first in Indiana.

It was the first in this region, the Wabash Valley, to get rollers, which is the technology that's still being used today.

So two big rollers that go like this, grain goes down, gets crushed, falls between them.

With the rollers, you can actually very finely control how the fineness and, like, how fast it's going.

With stones, you can't really push the stones much closer together than they are already set.

If you do, it might start a fire or it will get a real nasty taste, or it's just going to be grinding it too close.

With the metal rollers, you could actually run the grain through the same machine again and again to get a very even, fine and high-quality product.

>> Rohm's mill needed more power than a traditional waterwheel could offer, and so he installed an underwater turbine in 1886, which is still in place.

And 138 years later, still functional.

Turbines were used in a lot of mills in the latter half of the 1800s when they started becoming very viable.

So they started to replace waterwheels and the vertical turbines that you find at, say, a place like Spring Mill State Park at their mill.

All right.

So out here is the mill pond that directs the water off the creek.

By using this gate here, we can get the water down into the turbines and get the mill turned on.

So the water, we control it with a series of gates.

And historically, you would have had about 7 feet of water sitting on top of that turbine.

That water then goes through holes in the side of the casing, and more or less, pushes water pressure on to a spinning fan blade, and that's what creates the circular motion.

So this particular mill is all belt run.

We've got one shaft that comes out of the turbine.

From there, we hook up all the belts and the belts spin each of the machines.

It was running the four wheat rollers, 16 elevator banks, as well as probably about 15 to 20 other pieces of machinery just dedicated to processing wheat.

♪ >> But it wasn't just modern equipment that made this mill superior.

The design of the building played a large part too.

>> So the verticality of the mill, it kind of gives the ability of the mill to go up.

So when someone comes in and dumps the grain, they're actually going to dump it in a drop chute that goes down to the basement.

The elevators then will move it all the way up to the top of the building and gravity can then work its way from there.

And then you can arrange the flow of the mill so that as it goes through, it hits the most amount of machines that it needs in a single run; whereas, otherwise, you would have to move everything on a, like, horizontal plain, which would actually be much harder at the time.

>> The mill changed hands several times over the years, but it had a surprisingly long life, only ceasing operations in 1967.

In 1995, it was gifted to the Indiana DNR for historic preservation.

And today, it's open for tours, allowing the public to get a glimpse of what Indiana was like at a pivotal period in time.

>> Most people don't really think about where their food comes from and what went into making it that way.

And so here at the mill, we very much are able to show you the process has been there for a while.

And they get to kind of see how people pieced that together and came up with all of that.

>> For our last story today, you better buckle up!

We're headed back in time to a death-defying era of racing at the Jungle Park Speedway.

>> There was a time when this quiet patch of woods tucked into a bend of Sugar Creek rumbled with engines drowning out the roar of thousands of cheering race fans.

Only bits and pieces of the once bustling Jungle Park Speedway remain, but the signs, once you see them, are unmistakable.

>> There's this grandstand, big old wooden grandstand in the woods, and you think, what is this doing here?

What could people have been looking at?

And you realize, there's some banking here and it looks manmade.

This is -- this is an oval.

This is a racetrack.

>> The races at this half mile oval were fast, wild and extremely dangerous, for drivers and spectators alike.

>> Even for a racetrack in the '30s, it was dangerous.

There were trees around it!

The fans were standing about 15 feet away from where the race cars -- where their groove was.

Spectators were injured and killed not that infrequently.

But back then, the value of life was very different than it is now.

Spectator gets killed, but who won the race?

>> That very thing happened in the summer of 1928.

The headlines announced the winner of the race, and a paragraph later, got around to mentioning the death of one Mrs. Charles Kiger.

She wouldn't be last person to meet their end at Jungle Park.

>> The track was the brain child of a young entrepreneur from rural Boone County, named Earl Padgett.

>> He bought some land down in Parke County, and by 1926, he had a dirt track, and people started pouring into it, thousands of people at a time.

They sat and paid $1 to watch these cars go 100 miles an hour on dirt!

It must have been just breathtaking!

>> On a good day, around 5,000 people would crowd around the fences to watch the races at Jungle Park.

Firsthand accounts note the wild atmosphere at the track.

>> It was rowdy and crowded.

I was, like, four, five years old.

I remember the drinking was heavy!

People drank beer, long necks.

One car went off the track on the backstretch, flipped and caught on fire.

Back then, they didn't have much safety equipment.

People ran and put the fire out with their beer.

>> And it wasn't just the crowd that was unruly.

Even the organizers weren't really living up to their titles.

Jack Shanklin raced there back in the '50s.

>> I turned over between turns three and four during qualifying.

There was no guardrail or nothing.

I went over the bank.

It wasn't at all organized.

They didn't even have a stopwatch.

They were supposed to be using a stopwatch for qualification, and the guy had a silver dollar in his hands, acting like he had a stopwatch.

>> Jungle Park wasn't the premier racing venue of its day.

That one was some 60 miles to the east, but it was a steppingstone for a number of world-class drivers.

>> Jungle Park was the very minor leagues of racing.

Like baseball, it was you started in the, you know, farm teams, the Triple-A, Double-A, Single-A, that kind of thing, and worked your way up.

A handful of very top drivers did come through Jungle Park.

Indy 500 winners Wilbur Shaw, for instance, raced at Jungle Park.

But once he won the 500, he wasn't going to race again at Jungle Park, because everybody knew it was exceptionally dangerous.

>> While the danger was certainly part of the draw, it was also likely part of what brought it to an end.

>> Other tracks had come along, and so it was copied in many little towns.

And so the crowds were getting smaller and smaller.

>> In 1955, it basically went away.

But five years later, they decided let's try it one more time.

>> This last hooray proved Jungle Park was too dangerous for mid-century Americans.

>> Fans came like they used to come.

There was a crash.

A woman who was on a blanket watching the race and moved to get out of the way of it, but did not get out of the way of it, and was crushed, and she died.

And that was pretty much it for Jungle Park.

By 1960, our whole concept of life and death had changed from 1926, and we weren't as comfortable with it as we had been earlier.

So that pretty much was the end of it.

>> Now, the old grandstands and a state historical marker are all that remains of this once bustling racetrack.

>> There was a time thousands of people walked around here, and there was all this action going on here, and then people just walked away from it and left it as it is, and there it is, just rotting away.

It's haunting, and it's beautiful to me in a way.

I hope you enjoyed our trip to Parke County.

We'll leave you here today at Turkey Run State Park, and we'll see you next time on "Journey Indiana."

♪