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Thank you.

Gerry Masse: When you think of Indiana you kinda think of a flat place with corn and that's not Greene County at all.

CARMAN JACKSON: Family values are so strong here.

It's not like living in a big city.

STEVE CORBIN: The people are friendly and welcoming.

Everybody, you know, kind of knows each other.

ABBY HENKEL: Greene County is just a really beautiful place and a lot of people don't know about that.

I'd say it's a bit of a hidden gem.

Once you discover it, you wanna keep coming back.

CARMAN JACKSON: The pace is a bit slower.

The ability to get outside, fishing, hunting, hiking, off-roading.

There's something for everyone if you look for it.

Sometimes, it's like stepping back in history a bit and just slowing down and that is a lot of the beauty of Greene County.

CHERYL HAMILTON: We've had parade for 114 years but in the 70s, 60s, the festival truly started kicking off into the huge event that it's become.

Linton has two Christmases but we really do have Christmas in July.

People do have traditions on 4 July here, it's, you know, you get up early, you go have breakfast, you get your spot on the parade route and then you visit with friends and family afterwards for picnics and barbecues.

And then from that point, you hang out in the afternoon, enjoy company and then you head to the park for fireworks.

It's a great day of fun.

JOHN COTTER: The Freedom Festival Committee put together and we come up with a theme for the parade.

CHERYL HAMILTON: So our theme this year, we're celebrating small town traditions.

JOHN COTTER: This particular float, I started on in November, last year because I know normally, we get down to 1 June and it's panic time.

Oh gosh, I don't have my floats done!

CHERYL HAMILTON: It is Indiana's largest Independence Day parade.

JOHN WILKES: Between 30,000 and 40,000 people will come to it.

And when you go down the parade route and you look at the spectators along the side, some places are 12-15 deep around on the street.

It's just a great, great time.

CHERYL HAMILTON: Here, we got this slogan, 'You'll like Linton' and you really do.

It's a community that cares about everyone.

JOHN COTTER: Greene County is a fairly tight knit county.

When you say, hey, I need help, everybody steps up to the plate and of all Greene County is that way.

JOHN WILKES: The population of Linton is 5,213.

For the county, it has 33,000.

I think Greene County is a very unique place, it's a very rural county, it has a lot of beautiful scenery but it's just a nice, quiet place to live.

The mining started big in the 1850s.

Within 10 years, Linton went from a population of 3,000 to a population of about 12,000.

In this area, there was over 200 mines.

BRIAN OLIVER: We are a great athletic school.

I mean, our football program is solid, our basketball program, boys and girls, do really well.

We've had just about every sport.

have represented that state at some point.

On a good night and there's a big game, this place is usually packed, standing room all around the track, bleachers are full, the atmosphere is electrifying, the band is playing and cheerleaders going.

It's a pretty unique atmosphere whenever this place is rowdy for a big championship game.

There's bragging rights between people that work at the coal mines.

CHERYL HAMILTON: Especially small communities like this, they tend to really rally around whatever is going on at the school.

If it's band doing their band concert, it is the drama, doing their spring play.

BRIAN OLIVER: A lot of kids in this area need a little bit of extra guidance after school and so, we're always happy to do that.

No matter what program it is, we always love them and we're trying to push them to make them better people.

Yeah, we wanna win, don't get me wrong but we want our players to be successful in life and so sometimes, making decisions for them isn't always easy.

Probably one of my most rewarding parts of the job is being able to get to know these kids and watch them grow up to be young men.

And we got a lot of hard workers, I mean, this town was built on coal mines and so, you go through the coal mines, you had to be a hard worker.

And a lot of our players in football, they later go on to the next level, play college ball.

We had a lot of our guys that go straight in the workforce or a lot of our guys even go straight to the military.

That's something we're pretty proud of because we try to build those kids up with the work ethic and then they go into boot camp and they say how easy it is.

We're here in Greene County, I mean, I've been here my entire life and I love the communities, you got a lot of small towns, you have a lot of things you can do outdoors, whether it's going to a state park, going to a city park.

There's a lot of families around here that support one another and that's what's great about Greene County.

MARK STACY: The Linton Farmers' Market, it's a relatively small market but it's a very vibrant market.

You can get just about a week's worth of groceries here from fresh fruits and vegetables to frozen meats.

We have lots of baked goods, breads and pies and cakes.

The Linton Farmers' Market started back in 2013 and it started because my wife and I, we love to have local sustainable foods and we just couldn't find that in our community at that time.

We complained about that fact that we had to make this two hour round trip just to go to a farmers' market to some friends of ours who happened to be on the Linton Park Board.

So when the idea of a farmers' market came up at one of the Park Board's meetings, our friends knew exactly who should be running and we've been running ever since.

Our number one goal is to offer Linton residents an opportunity to purchase fresh, local, healthy foods.

We also want to simply create a friendly, inviting community experience and we also want to support the local economy.

Greene County is a rather rural environment, so there's a lot of open ground here, so there's a lot of farming in this area.

It's mostly traditional commodity crops but there is a movement now for more small farmers growing food to be sold at venues like farmers' markets or restaurants or small local grocery stores and that's the whole local sustainable food system that we as a market is trying to promote.

It's more than just a place to buy tomatoes and cucumbers, it's a place to build relationships and it's a wonderful place to spend a Saturday morning.

ARMONDA RIGGS: One of the big things that we really like was the topography of Greene County.

We need more people to grow food for us to eat and so we aren't shipping in 90 plus percent of the food that we consume in our state.

We don't have a great food system.

For us, it is hugely important that we promote other small farmers wanting to get into the field.

BEN RIGGS: Due to Greene county size, it's about twice the size of most counties, it's actually kind of two different counties together.

You've got the west and the east.

The west is more flat terrain, that's more of what you're looking for for for tilling whereas the east is more like Brown County or the Hoosier National Forest, it's more woods, it hasn't been touched before.

So you've kind of got two different climates or soils there.

We mainly focus on heirloom produce.

ARMONDA RIGGS: We find it best if we have niche products.

So we want to be the ones bringing ground cherries or Shiitake mushrooms or Kiwano melons.

A lot of them have never seen these products, so it gives us an opportunity to educate as well as to connect, to show them, you know, what we're doing here is important not just for the benefit and growth of our business but for the benefit of the community.

BEN RIGGS: The Farmer Veteran Coalition as name implies, it's for military veterans who decide to go to agriculture.

I participated in a program called Armed to Farm.

It's basically a one week training program where you learn about all different kinds of aspects of farming.

ARMONDA RIGGS: Farming, it's a career opportunity, we need more farmers.

Most of our farmers are at retirement age.

You know, the Armed to Farm and the Farmer Veteran Coalition are great ways to help connect veterans to getting into the farming career.

BEN RIGGS: We just happened to be blessed with lots of maples.

Because it's so hilly, we don't want to use buckets like the traditional way, so we use the more modern way of using plastic tubing.

So we hook up all these tubes to the trees, we drill a small hole, we tap them and they all get collected into plastic barrels, food grade barrels.

At that point, once the sap starts flowing, it's mostly water and we want the small amount of sugar that's in it, so we have to get rid of all this water.

So the way to do it is to evaporate and so in the name of the game is surface area heat.

So we just boil and boil and boil, add more sap, boil and boil and boil, add more sap.

And so, over time, the sugar concentration goes up until at the point of about 67% sugar.

At that point we start drawing off the maple syrup.

ARMONDA RIGGS: When we started farming, we knew that we wanted to be good stewards of our land and regenerative agriculture is that.

JIM MURPHY: When you come here, you step back in time.

The Yoho family acquired this store in about 1938 and owned and operated it for about 50 years.

You could purchase about anything you needed.

There was a serving window whereby people could walk up on the outside and order something, typically, it was ice cream.

Because when you ask someone about what they remember about the Yoho general store, they often say, I remember going to the store and having ice cream, which I do, too.

I would come here often from my home which was just a few miles from here and I would get better pecan ice cream because that was my favorite.

LARRY SHUTE: In 1934, this store burned to the ground totally and they had to rebuild and start all over.

That was one of the things that changed to face the community again.

But across the street, there was a little café there called Dutch's Restaurant and we would go in there after a basketball game from the high school and have spiced ham sandwiches.

That was a mainstay, it was delicious and a milkshake, which was also delicious.

You could eat and drink for less than a buck.

JIM MURPHY: So it really provided for the needs of this community and the communities nearby.

And I do remember speaking with Lavon Yoho and him telling me that in the early days, he used to deliver food and he would box it up and put it in his truck and he would haul it throughout the communities in these rural back roads and he would do that on a regular basis.

During the restoration and certainly after restoration, we built it with pride and we wanted to make sure that this building would stand here for another 100 years.

CFC specialize in historic preservation and restoration.

We felt it was very important to maintain that connection with the community and with the family and it was in pretty bad shape.

When we restored this building, we completely stripped it down and we literally held the store kind of up in the air and removed the footer foundation from underneath it but we wanted to retain the original character of the store.

So when you walk into the store, if you're from out of town, you kind of walk back in time and you'll be able to sit down and you have that southern Indiana hospitality and great food, friendly staff.

We have some people, some locals that come here, two sometimes three times a day.

This investment in the Yoho General Store in Solsberry, it's about the community.

We was able to save an icon in this community that they really needed.

MALEA HUFFMAN: This is one of Greene County's treasures, it is an active railroad bridge.

It is in Central Greene County close to Tulip.

Since I was a young girl, you talked about the viaduct, you knew about the viaduct.

I don't think at the time, I knew that it was the longest or the biggest, I just knew that when you came out here and you saw the full expanse, like that's something pretty neat, you knew it wasn't something that you're used to see everyday.

So I have two young daughters and for a while there, we had to pass this daily and without fail, no matter what they were doing, if they were whining, if they were crying, if they were reading.

As we approached, they would start to watch for it and the second they saw it, they would say, "oh, there it is!"

LARRY SHUTE: But it is beautiful.

You go down there in the spring and the summer and the fall and it's beautiful.

MALEA HUFFMAN: So the bridge is 2,295 feet long, it's 157 feet tall, I believe it is 2,700 tons of steel.

It was built in 1905/1906 and at the time, I believe it was the longest in the United States and the third longest in the world.

LARRY SHUTE: The original cost was $246,504 or in today's number, $20 million.

Passenger trains ran on it until 1945 and then they started running freight.

MALEA HUFFMAN: They were trying to transport coal.

LARRY SHUTE: It became a family-oriented destination.

People would come and have picnics, they had top hats and wire-rim glasses and the black coats and suits.

I mean, they dressed up for it.

MALEA HUFFMAN: Any given day, you can see three to four trains cross if you're patient.

When I go into classrooms, when I go into groups with a lot of kids to let them know that in their county, 15 miles from their home, is a bridge that at one point was the longest in the United States.

I can remember coming here and there was a lot of graffiti and there was a lot of just trash and litter and some community members came together.

LARRY SHUTE: And we finally got together and decided to build a deck.

MALEA HUFFMAN: Our first goal was to have a safe place to pull over and observe the deck that wasn't trespassing on railroad property.

People come here to write sermons, they come here to get married, they come here to just sit and be.

The history is very important in keeping that alive and the next generations is very important to us and a sense of community.

So Greene County is in an incredibly unique landscape in that half the county was covered with glaciers and half of it is unglaciated and so, you have beautiful ridges and hills.

That combined with how much public land we have, it's just great.

RON MCBRIDE: Greene County is a hotbed of basketball.

RON KNEPP: The tradition here runs deep.

You feel that from the fans, when the band is playing and it is a rich tradition.

RON MCBRIDE: Here, everybody knows a lot about basketball.

You know, as a coach, sometimes, they think they know more than you do.

RON KNEPP: I've been coaching ever since college.

They are a great group of young ladies in the program.

MALEA TOON: You know, he taught me a lot about basketball but he also taught me a lot about how to be a good person and how to be responsible for yourself and just a lot of life lessons as well.

RON MCBRIDE: The Bloomfield community is a very close knit community.

You got so many schools, since we're small here, you have a lot of rivalry that are close.

You know, you can go 15 miles one way, 20 miles another way.

MARISSA MCINTOSH: Bloomfield is crazy about basketball.

Game nights are kind of a big deal.

Boys games on a Saturday night, that's where everybody is.

There were always pep blocks, the band was there, people that weren't even associated, didn't have a kid playing, didn't have a grandkid playing, they'd come just to watch the games.

RON KNEPP: So that tradition just goes down from generation to generation.

MEGHAN FRANKLIN: And with teaching, I mean, coaching just kind of goes hand in hand.

So, yes, I do love the game but more importantly, I love the kids and I love helping them work through obstacles in their life and using basketball to do that.

This community stands together and they're here for you for life.

RON KNEPP: It has to be more than just winning basketball games for me as a coach.

We push them to excel, we demand their best.

If you hang your head in basketball, you're gonna miss one or two possessions and you're still playing the last play.

Your past does not define you, you have to play the next play in life.

MARISSA MCINTOSH: You have that support system So like when we went and played in the regional my senior year, like the whole town of Bloomfield was at the regional in Southwest Shelby in this little town that took two hours to get to and I mean, Bloomfield community is something special.

RON MCBRIDE: And I taught here for 48 years.

I mean, it's just a very friendly community.

RON KNEPP: Bloomfield High School has started a fundraiser for mental health awareness.

And tonight's game, we call it the Greene Game because it's Greene County teams.

We need to do better and that's what we're trying to do is raise awareness that mental health illness is just an illness.

We wanna make sure people understand their value, we want to make sure people understand that their loved.

MEGHAN FRANKLIN: More important than basketball is our relationships with these teenagers and as they're growing up, that they know that they have someone they can always depend on even after long after they graduate.

STEVE CORBIN: My guiding principle is to make classic beer styles for the local community.

This community is very rural and small and are really just starting to get into craft beers.

So they're not gonna be necessarily looking for the the new hype beer train to come through town just yet.

So we're brewing the beers that they're a little more familiar with and then trying to get them to step out of their comfort zone to have some beers that maybe they've not heard of.

So this place, my whole life, I had always known it as the Feed Store.

I would always come in here and buy bait or ammunition or sodas, snacks, that sort of thing.

Now, instead of going down to the Feed Store to grab some crickets, it's going a feed store to grab a beer.

So I first started home brewing about seven years ago.

It was OK beer but it was a lot of fun going through the process and I started making five gallon batches.

I'm an engineer by trade, so I've really enjoyed refining my processes and proving how I make the beer, improving the water quality and ingredient quality that I'm using.

We're brewing a wide variety of classic styles currently.

Of course, we're brewing IPAs, lighter beers for the folks that are more into the big macro beers.

We're trying to use as many Indiana ingredients as we can, we're also sourcing hops as locally as we can.

There's also a yeast lab in Bloomington called Wild Pitch Yeast that we've been able to source locally harvested yeast for our beers as well.

A lot of times I'll get people that come in and say, well, I don't really like beer and so then I'll ask them what they do like and you can kind of take those flavors that they like, if they like a dry wine or a sweet wine or, you know, dark chocolate or any of those flavors, you can make a parallel over to the beer world and usually find something that somebody is gonna like.

They may not go away a beer drinker but they're at least gonna go away with a good experience because you're connecting with them.

A brewery can really be a cornerstone to revitalizing a neighborhood or a town and that's really kind of a hope that we have, is that we can help this area thrive and grow and bring more people whether they're coming here to live or just to visit and enjoy the things that we have to offer.

CARMAN JACKSON: Redbird State Recreation Area is the state's first publicly owned property that allows off-road vehicle use.

Redbird is a part of the former Sherman-Templeton Mine complex.

It was both surface-mined and underground-mined.

It was one of the most prolific mines in the state of Indiana in its time.

It makes it a very unique property.

Any time that you're out here, you're gonna be on some pretty rough topography.

It's totally different from what you see in most of Indiana.

There's also areas where we've had some reclamation done that you're gonna be on flatter areas that are more like a prairie.

So there's quite a bit of diversity from super easy to really difficult.

The total size of Redbird is 1,450 acres.

We have about 45 miles of off-road vehicle trails.

Today is our annual night ride.

So we actually leave the property open from Saturday morning until Sunday evening and you can use the trails all night.

Normally, we're only open dawn to dusk.

So this is a real treat for a lot of people.

The night ride here at Redbird is just a total different experience.

It totally changes the trails and the atmosphere and how you see the trails.

You're out here at night, you'll watch a lot of the lights just going straight up in the air and then just totally disappear.

So you're going up into the unknown and then down into the unknown.

Redbird is kind of a local community remembrance and memory zone.

It has a very long history.

Generations of riders will have three generations that come out here and great grandpa used to come out here and ride, too.

So you have a real long history and a tie to this land because it's been used like this for years.

I like the dirt bike ride and you just kind of bob and weave and it's just a fun, relaxing experience where I don't have to think too hard.

I think it's important for Greene County to have a resource like Redbird because it ties into Greene County history.

Family values are so strong here, it's not like living in a big city.

There's something for everyone if you look for it.

Sometimes, it's like stepping back in history a bit and just slowing down and that is a lot of the beauty of Greene County.

STEVE SISCOE: I think what makes Greene-Sullivan stand out is the mining history that we have here.

Greene-Sullivan started out with a donation of a couple thousand acres from Central Indiana Coal Company in 1936.

Since then, it's grown, it encompasses about 9,000 acres now and is divided between Greene and Sullivan counties in Indiana.

About 90% of the forest has been strip-mined for coal.

So the area is filled with what we call stripper hills which is a series of roll of hills from the mining process and small lakes.

The forest is very beautiful.

We have boat-launching areas on 75 lakes here in the forest, it provides a lot of fishing opportunities for folks.

The lakes are stocked with like bass, bluegill, redear, channel catfish.

The state record bluegill was actually recorded out of the forest.

We have a horse campground and we got about 25 miles of bridle trails.

I think it's very important for the public to have places like Greene-Sullivan to go recreate, get outside 'cause I look at a big picture that's way down the road.

What we want to see is the next generation's long term to have a place to come, that the forest will still exist, will still be here.

ROB HOGG: People coming here for the first time are very surprised at what we have to offer.

Shakamak was created in 1927 to 1930.

We have almost a little over 1,200 acres.

We have almost 400 acres of that, are water and those are in three different lakes, Lake Lenape, Lake Kickapoo and Lake Shakamak.

Originally, we had a dive tower and they did the Olympic trials for diving here.

We had a famous movie star came and dive off our tower, we also did swim trials.

So they swam just the length of what they called a pool but it was lanes in the lake and that made Shakamak very popular for several, several years.

Unfortunately, the tower is no longer there but we've made that area into accessible fishing pier.

We have one of the biggest slides in the state park system.

It doesn't have the massive crowds, so you're not really beat down with so many people and it's nice to get away and relax here.

Part of my job is to make sure that there is a space for the public to go to, the citizens of Indiana, Greene County and surrounding areas every day to get them to come out and they hike and they bike and they walk in and they go fishing and they take their kids fishing or kayaking.

And I know when they leave Shakamak, they leave in a better mood and a better sense of where they're at and what they need to do.

I usually spend at least five to 10 minutes every morning when I come to work.

I just shut my truck off, roll the windows down and the wind is usually blowing off the lakes and it's just really nice to say, hey, this is gonna be a great day.

JEREMY WAGGLER: The dragstrip, it's an eighth mile track and then it has like 1,400 feet of shutdown.

So our best times at the track right now are like 3.8 seconds at 210 miles an hour.

So it handles pretty fast cars.

I was in high school when it first opened and that was the place to be, come out here with your buddies and drag race each other and I had a good time out here.

Never dreamed I'd be able to buy a place that I used to race during high school.

I was up here as a kid, so I never dreamed we'd be able to buy it and have a place to have testing, we always planned on doing training center and everything up here at one location.

So we built a pulling track doing truck pulling, tractor pulling, drag racing, UTV racing.

So everything is kind of on one spot here.

We have races where people come in from completely on the other side of the country.

So like this weekend, we'll have a race coming in with guys coming from Oregon, Washington State.

It's crazy to think that people will travel that far to go down an eighth mile strip.

As a kid growing up, always working on hot rod cars and since had it in my blood.

As a farm boy, I wanted to get into building engines and that's kind of what led me into Wagler Competition, started it in 2011 and we're running Wagler Competition.

So we're building custom engines, custom parts for race cars, we sell parts to several other countries.

It's a dream come true on that part.

And then buying a racetrack to go along with that business, we can bring our customers out here in Greene County and basically test the engines that we build and put them into customer vehicles.

We've had a lot of the guys that are around this area always coming by, stopping and helping, volunteering their time.

We've got local farmers coming out, bringing their equipment out, you don't even have to ask him a lot of times, they'll just show up and say, here it is, it's ready to go out there and disc the field or whatever you need.

It's amazing to have a little place in Greene County.

It's not just about bringing a race in, it's about the whole atmosphere, bringing people and showing them what we have to offer around this area.

Young kids coming in, a lot of them have never been around drag cars or truck and tractor pulling and so, it's interesting to talk to them and explain what we do as a business so they can come in and and kind of relate to what is going on around this area.

A family coming out here to the racetrack on a Saturday afternoon, you can come out here, it's open pit area.

So all the drag cars are lined up, you can talk to the drivers, you can talk to the pit crews.

So it brings out a lot of different age groups.

So you can have young kids that are very interested in it and also their grandparents.

So it's a it's an entertainment for a lot of different age groups out here.

DR. KYLE WERNER: The Naval Surface Warfare Center has a mission that's focused on the research development, test acquisition and evaluation of technologies that are sensor and weapon system related, Crane is not a best kept secret and what we do, we'd love to share with people.

The mission says, they go on a crane.

There is significant national relevant research that's going on right here in Indiana that is preserving and protecting those freedoms that we all enjoy so dearly.

It's about sixty 62,000 acres or 97 square miles, that represents the third largest naval installation across the globe.

LARRY FINK: The surprise that I get when people say, where do you work and I say, I work on a naval base in the center of kind of southern Indiana, they look at me and and they say, well, what does a naval base doing up here?

DR. KYLE WERNER: The base was actually commissioned in 1941 on December 1st, just a few short days before the bombing of World War Two occurred in Pearl Harbor.

And the base was basically located strategically with the mindset that should the United States come under attack at either the West or the East Coast, there will be somewhere in the heartland that would have the ability to store conventional ammunition and ordnance that would not be subject to a coastal attack.

We work very closely with our nation's elite war fighters, so think Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, the Delta Force, the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command or United States Marine Corps.

And we outfit them with sensor and weapon systems to ensure that they have the ability to conduct those expeditionary missions in a successful manner.

In Greene County, we've got about 530 civilian employees that represent about $48 million worth of payroll.

LARRY FINK: Because the communities surrounding here, especially Greene County, are so close knit with one another, that sense of family, they bring it into Crane and that mentality propagates.

DR. KYLE WERNER: The five schools with Greene County includes Linton, Bloomfield, Shakamak, Eastern Greene and White River Valley.

In each of those areas, we have active STEM programs that are getting exposure to projects that are relevant to NSWC, Crane.

LARRY FINK: And they bring it back in and they're educating our young men and women about what it is to be a scientist, what it is to be an engineer, what it is to be a technology expert.

Greene County is a wonderful place to raise a family.

It's rural enough to where you feel not having to worry about about big city life but it does have the technology that surrounded the support, the kind of lifestyle that most of the big cities, I would say, enjoy.

Aside from a mass transit system where you'll probably catch an Amish vehicle with the horse-drawn trailer coming through.

It is a family based society and that is one of the most important things.

DAVID RUPP: All these big birds that are either perched on trees on the edge of the water or are sitting on the muskrat hammocks, those are all bald eagles at different ages and I think I see two adults and four immature, here's one that's not sleeping.

So this is a pretty cool duck.

We're right at the southern edge of their breeding range and during the winter, it becomes one of the most abundant properties that we have out here, Goose Pond.

Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife area is managed by the Division of Fish and Wildlife.

DAVID RUPP: About 9,000 acres of wetlands and grassland and just wonderful wildlife habitat.

The mallards seem to be pretty flighty today and about the only time I see the mallards is when they're flying away.

People visit Goose Pond from all over because it's one of the great excursions that people can do when they're visiting Indiana.

For most people, Goose Pond is famous for the sandhill cranes that migrate, particularly in February but every month of the year has great things to offer from a bird watcher standpoint.

Here's a harrier coming right through in front, right over the marsh here in front of us, you can see that white rump patch.

This used to be called a marsh hawk because of its habitat that it prefers.

We'll get things like rough-legged hawks and northern harriers in the winter and not spring, you get a lot of migrating shorebirds.

It's a fantastic spot for unique birds.

NYLE RIEGLE: The history of Goose Pond really goes back a long way.

This is a shallow basin that about 10,000 years plus ago, there was a glacier here and that glacier started melting.

And when it was through melting, it left what we've got as the Goose Pond.

And then over the years, it has been farmed, it's been a cattle ranch, it's been a number of things.

Efforts have been made to buy the property at the state level and the federal level and turn it back into its natural wetlands area that eventually came to pass in about 2000.

BRIDGET STANCOMBE: I think the best place to see sandhill cranes coming up and just filling the sky.

If you just come and stand in the parking lot of the visitor center, sometimes they will come up out of the surrounding cornfields and fly over to go out into the wetlands, out on the property and it is so loud, it's deafening.

DANE STRAHLE: It's memorable.

It's absolutely when 2,000 or 3,000 snow geese get up off the water at the same time, you'll never forget that.

NYLE RIEGLE: I've driven through here and you almost think you're in the Serengeti when the sky literally turns dark because of the number of birds that are in the air.

And so, it's a unique thing that you can't find anywhere else close to this.

Goose Pond in Southwestern Indiana has become one of the main wintering spots for whooping cranes.

It's an endangered species.

They nest up in Wisconsin.

GEORGE SLY: The Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area actually has global importance and in fact, it's been designated as a globally significant birding area by the National Audubon Society.

Historically, not only in Indiana but really throughout the United States, we've lost about 90% of our wetlands, about 90% of our prairies are gone now, converted to farmland, urban sprawl.

To have a gem like this, you know, 9,000 acres of restored wetland, prairie and forest habitat.

When you come here, you're not only getting wildlife experience but you're getting a little bit of a glimpse of what Indiana looked like in pre-colonial times.

BRIDGET STANCOMBE: When Goose Pond restoration was completed, we started to get more rare birds that showed up.

NYLE RIEGLE: We've had a hooded crane that normally is a native to Russia and China and they nest in the same area in the Arctic, in the north and for some reason, it made a left instead of a right.

BRIDGET STANCOMBE: And that brought people from across the country because they wanted to see this bird.

It's a lifer for them.

DANE STRAHLE: The only time, that I know of, is it was ever spotted in the United States.

It was rare, really rare.

BRIDGET STANCOMBE: I've done field trips with kids and it's it's a lot of fun to get the kids out here and get their feet wet and it gives them a healthy relationship with the environment, it teaches them that it's really important.

Goose Pond is a treasure to this day, if not the Midwest.

GEORGE SLY: Well, you can come here and see something that you're likely not to see anyplace else in the United States.

GERRY MASSE: When we work with this boiling hot metal, it's kind of like jumping off a cliff and right at the end, a parachute pops out and you're alive.

It's an adrenaline rush.

We don't get a little burnt, we're kind of sad.

It takes a weird kind of odd person to really love pouring iron because it's dangerous but we love it.

So at Sculpture Trails, you will find over 150 pieces created by artists all over the world, it's ongoing, so it's forever changing.

We also have the interns in the woods, make new paths, changing things around.

So it's a really nice place to always find something new.

If you're lucky, Ali and Trent, our dogs, they are the best tour guides you'll ever have but they will require a lot of petting because to show up, go for a tour, you don't even have to tell us you're here.

It's an open and free self-guided tours, there's maps at the very beginning of the trail.

And if you're a professional artist that wants to learn how to cast iron, we have workshops available.

HUGH PATTON: Artists come from really all over to be a part of the workshop.

We ran through 30,000 pounds of iron in just the month of July.

GERRY MASSE: Sculpture Trails first started out back in 2002 is when we finally decided, hey, let's throw some of these big giant sculptures that were all made out on the path out of our folks property.

Because my mom and my sisters had one of the biggest craft shows in Greene County.

So we thought, you know, while they're here, at least somebody will see these sculptures.

HUGH PATTON: They're sculptures right off the trails, there's some that are a little hidden and tucked away.

They just kind of have their stories, some have travelled really far to be here and some were made right here and then installed right here.

People who come here, not only do they see what the finished work looks like, but so they really can see the process of what it takes to put a sculpture in the ground.

I'm a sculptor and my practice is pretty interdisciplinary materials wise.

This area has been really great for me to live and work as an artist, a really nice place to feel connected to like nature and also engage with artwork in a different setting.

GERRY MASSE: We wanted to create an environment for everybody to enjoy fine art, contemporary sculpture.

If it's going to be for everybody around here, it's nice to be able to walk in the woods and collide with nature.

So this whole idea of art in nature together makes it a comfortable setting for anybody to come out and discover that they do love art, do love this wild crazy sculpture thing happening out in the woods.

When we bring in a resident artist or an artist from somewhere around the world and they love to tell them, hey, I came all the way from Boston to be here in Greene County to be able to work at Sculpture Trails, you guys have a wonderful place to stay and learn.

There's no other place like it.

RORY BEHRENS: They think, oh, professional theater in Bloomfield, in Greene County, really?

Yeah, come check it out.

BRI LINDSEY: Shawnee is the oldest consecutively running summer stock in the state of Indiana.

It started out in a barn, 1960 was the first season.

BRETTENEY BEVERLY: When people come to see shows here they have never been because we do get a lot of first timers and we've been here for 60 years and they're surprised.

One, they're like it's a hidden gem.

BRI LINDSEY: Well, I think what makes us unique is the fact that you have all these professionals from all over the United States that choose to come live in the middle of a field in Bloomfield and do theater and it's a great place for actors to get a start.

DANIELLE O'CONNOR: My first summer here, I worked on Beanie and the Bamboozling Book Machine, which is a kid's show and there's a lot of like magic and a lot of special effects.

RORY BEHRENS: Unofficially, my title is Cruise Captain or Theater Dad, kind of be here for moral support or for helping the young college students out.

Don't feel like you have to conserve throughout the entire show.

You can come back and buy more information.

DANIELLE O'CONNOR: It's an amazing, like once in a lifetime unique opportunity here.

The community, the board, all of the patrons that come in, they really make you feel at home, they make you feel like this is a family and the support that the community has, they come back every year, they love the shows, they wanna know where everyone's from.

BRETTENEY BEVERLY: We have a couple that has been to every show for all 60 years of Shawnee.

BRI LINDSEY: This season, we have 40 to 50 people on site depending on the day.

DANIELLE O'CONNOR: It's like camp because we are, you know, in the middle of farmlands.

We're right next to a horse pasture.

BRI LINDSEY: We have campfires at night, we cook together, we all work 10:00 to 10:00, six days a week.

RORY BEHRENS: You're living your job 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We will all come out on stage and dance for you, you see how this game works.

BRETTENEY BEVERLY: And so, we spend all day together and you think you can get a little stir-crazy and I think sometimes we do.

But I think it's just makes us closer and it makes us more of a family.

RORY BEHRENS: It is a job but it's also a lifestyle.

BRI LINDSEY: It's fun to watch the kids come in and some of them are just like, TOMATOES!

and they buy big bags to just chuck them at the actors.

RORY BEHRENS: You'll have $5 for a bag.

Every bag holds 10.

Some of them are soft, some of them are hard, some of them have tennis balls and some of them have rocks.

BRI LINDSEY: And then we have special like if you had a hole, they have to dance and there's certain things or if we catch them, we make the audience dance.

So it's just a really goofy hour long.

It's a good way to break people in the theater.

DANIELLE O'CONNOR: The work I do here, first and foremost, fills me with pride.

It kind of goes back to the fact that this community is a family.

RORY BEHRENS: There are people that have been coming for 60 years who are just diehard fans.

DANIELLE O'CONNOR: It is such a welcoming and wonderful place.

BRI LINDSEY: I love giving back to the community that raised me, I love getting to pass on to the kids and the youth.

Just have the heart to come back and feed back into the community, that helped me be who I was.

JOHN COTTER: I think we're kind a hidden gem in Indiana.

MALEA HUFFMAN: This is an incredible community, this is an incredible county with a lot of depth and a lot of resources.

ARMONDA RIGGS: I think Greene County is a great place to establish your family, to establish a small business.

You can find a place where you will not only fit in but be productive.

If you have the initiative, you can do a lot of great things, in Greene County.

LARRY SHUTE: Everything here taught me something about life and l say I love it.

I wouldn't go anywhere else.

STEVE CORBIN: I grew up here, I've lived here my entire life.

My son can get on his bike and just ride to his friend's house and I do not have to worry about anything.

The community, you know, really just kind of looks out for each other.

CARMAN JACKSON: That's what makes it special.

It's people watch out for each other and they embrace each other.

DANIELLE O'CONNOR: It is such a welcoming and wonderful place.

JIM MURPHY: The values in Greene County are family, hardwork, commitment, home.

CARMAN JACKSON: Greene County is like coming home to family.

GERRY MASSE: Well, for me, Greene County is home.

BRI LINDSEY: As truly as home.

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SPEAKER: Support for Spirit of Greene County is provided by Regional Opportunity Initiatives, proud partner of the Indiana Uplands, advancing community prosperity through transformative education, workforce and placemaking strategies.

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Thank you.