The Dixie

Posted on July 14, 2022 by admin

We arrived in North Webster, Indiana, not long after 11 a.m. on July 3. We stopped there because the night before, I read the Atlas Obscura item about the Dixie.

“Steamboats first began sailing on the Webster Lake as early as 1902,” the item explains. “In 1914, Captain Joseph Breeck began operating a 65-foot, wooden-hulled sternwheeler named the Dixie, which today is the oldest of its kind still in operation.

“The original Dixie was later replaced by Captain Breeck with the current 76-foot steel-hulled Dixie in 1929, and he continued to operate the ship until his retirement in 1939.”

Eventually, in the early 21st century, a nonprofit acquired the vessel, renovating and updating it, paid for in large part through local donations. Now it makes tourist runs on Webster Lake in the summer months. We caught the 1 p.m. sailing.

The day was clear and very warm, perfect for a lake outing. Dixie wasn’t packed, but a fair number of people rode on both lower and upper decks. Tickets were a bargain: $7 for adults. Good for the nonprofit — it isn’t out to gouge tourists.

Dixie is a sternwheeler, and here’s the wheel. At the stern.

A moment before I took that picture, a boy of about six was standing at the rail, looking down at the wheel. His mother encouraged him to leave, though I hadn’t said anything to her. I was ready to wait my turn.

“He’s fascinated by the wheel,” she said.

“I bet he is,” I said approvingly, but I don’t think she heard me. Managing a small child can be distracting. But if that was his first ride on a sternwheeler, I hope she made note of it on his ticket, and that the family is packratish enough so that he finds it sometime in the 2070s.

As tour boat patter went, Dixie’s taped program was well crafted — a voice talking about the ship, the lake and the surrounding land, with some interludes of peppy but not overwhelming banjo and guitar instrumentals. More actual history than you get on some tours, but not an overload. No intentionally bad jokes, either, but some good detail, especially describing the earlier days of the Dixie.

Capt. Breeck wasn’t a tour operator. He was master of a small working ship, crossing the lake in clement weather to deliver cargo and packages, as well as passengers, such as womenfolk visiting the stores in the town of North Webster. Dixie also carried groceries that it sold, and for a while the captain — clearly a jack of some trades, anyway — operated a small smithy at the back of the vessel.

His successors eventually evolved into tour operators as the surrounding farms gave way to postwar pockets of resort-like development. By now at least three generations have taken rides, including first dates of later married couples, and people taken by their grandparents who are now taking their grandchilden.

Got some views from both decks.

The presentation’s detail about the shoreline is a bit of a blur — the boat docked here or there sometimes, the captain had his house at this other place, that island in the middle of the lake is owned by some notable Indiana family. The names came and went: Fisherman Cove, Miller’s Landing, Stumpy Flats, Weimer’s Landing.

But my ears perked up during the talk about the two sizable hotels that used to be on the lake. One was the Yellow Banks Hotel.

“A very grand hotel, built in 1902,” says the Dixie web site. “The original hotel and its wooden rowboats were painted yellow… This was a scheduled stop for the Dixie until the early 1960s. In the late 1960s the hotel changed owners and fell into disrepair. It briefly became an Italian restaurant (Novelli’s) in the late 1970s, but was dismantled in 1980. Dillinger and his gang stayed at the Yellow Banks Hotel, probably in October 1933 or April 1934.”

The Epworth Forest Hotel (from the web site).

The Epworth had an outdoor amphitheater. “The Dixie would pickup passengers in this protected cove on windy days,” the web site continues. “In 1955 the Dixie began hosting Epworth Forest’s production of Showboat. Once per year the Dixie became the stage for this off-Broadway play.

“By 1964 the cast and production became too large for the boat. From 1964 through 1980, the Dixie would simply deliver the cast of Showboat to this amphitheater for their annual performance. By 1981 the new owners of the Dixie had cancelled this tradition.”

Both of these hotels were cancelled, too, in the way things are usually canceled, not as the result of some moral outrage, but rather by the course of business. By the late 20th century, the economics of even a small resort area like Webster Lake meant that single-family homes, short-term rentals and condos became the norm along the shore.

Plenty of other watercraft were in the lake on that second day of the Independence Day long weekend. We got a lot of waves from passersby, and most everyone on the Dixie waved back. Us too.

I was out and about throughout the hour and a half or so the tour lasted, though I spent most of my time on the lower deck. My deck companions across the way didn’t, as far as I noticed, get up and move about.

They did shift a few times, though.

Northern Indiana Dash

Posted on July 6, 2022 by admin

Ah, high summer.

That’s in Dallas. I’m not there. Today’s high here was 79 F., a dip from a hot and muggy 90s-day on Tuesday. Several degrees of latitude will make that difference.

One of these days, the times might catch up with Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, leader in the Revolution and scourge of the Northwest Territory Indians, but for now, you can find him on horseback in bronze at Freimann Square in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana, in a work by Chicagoan George Etienne Ganiere (1865-1935).

We gazed a Mad Anthony for a few moments as part of our trip through northern Indiana. I wanted to take a short trip over the long Independence Day weekend, but I didn’t want it to consume the entire three days.

So on Saturday, we left in mid-morning and made our way to Fort Wayne, where we stayed overnight. On Sunday, we returned across northern Indiana to get home, which took up most of the day.

We arrived in Nappanee, Indiana, for lunch on Saturday. I’m glad to report that Main Street Roasters (not so new anymore, it seems) makes a fine pulled pork sandwich. Yuriko said the ingredients in her Cobb salad tasted very fresh, and I sampled some, and agreed. The place was doing a brisk business.

We figured the main source for both fresh pork and fresh greens was the Amish farms in the area. Nappanee is considered the focus of one of the country’s larger Amish populations, though that’s a little hard to tell in a casual look around downtown, which isn’t so different from other Indiana towns its size (pop. nearly 7,000). Out away from town, though, you can see from the road farm houses and other buildings, clustered closer than in other rural areas, which is characteristic of Amish settlements.

In town, Plain People in carriages rolled by now and then. Some female store clerks wore the small head coverings common among Mennonites. The Amish tourist attraction in Nappanee known as Amish Acres closed in late 2019, and a more upmarket property re-opened the next year — in an example of bad timing, though it seems to have survived — as The Barns at Nappanee, Home of Amish Acres. Maybe all those extra words are going to cost you more.

Across the street from Main Street Roasters (and not Amish Acres).

On Sunday, our first brief stop was at Magic Wand, home of the Magicburger, which can be found in Churubusco, Indiana.

We didn’t have a magic burger, but rather shared a strawberry milkshake to go. Among strawberry milkshakes, it was the real deal. The real tasty deal, straw-quaffed as we speed along U.S. 33.

Churubusco was a name I took an instant liking to. The town fathers apparently read in their newspapers about the battle of that name, and wanted the town to borrow a bit of its martial glory. According to some sources, it gets shortened in our time, and maybe for a long time, to Busco. I also noticed references to the place, on signs and the like, as Turtletown. Really? What was that about? I wondered.

The Beast of Busco, that’s what. Quite a story. A giant among turtles that the townsfolk never could quite capture. I haven’t had this much fun reading hyperlocal history — lore — since I chanced across a small lake in Wisconsin that is supposedly home to an underwater pyramid. Turtle Days was last month.

Another spot for a short visit on Sunday: Warsaw, Indiana. It’s the seat of Kosciusko County, with a handsome Second Empire courthouse rising in the town square.

Designed in the 1880s by Thomas J. Tolan, who died during construction, the Indiana Historical Society says. The project was completed by his son, Brentwood S. Tolan.

The square sports some other handsome buildings, too.

Warsaw is also home to a garden the likes of which I’d never imagined, and the reason I stopped in town, days after spotting it on Google Maps and then looking it up: the Warsaw Biblical Gardens.

The brainchild of a local woman back in the 1980s with access to the land. “It would be no ordinary garden — not a rock garden, nor a rose garden, nor a perennial garden — it would be a truly unique and beautiful Biblical Garden,” the garden’s web site says.

“Actually, we say ‘gardens’ because the Warsaw Biblical Gardens has a variety of areas: the Forest, Brook, Meadow, Desert, Crop and Herb gardens; the Grape Arbor; and the Gathering site. Warsaw Biblical Gardens is ¾-acre in size, and there are very few gardens like this in the United States.

“The term ‘biblical’ refers mainly to the fact that the plants, trees, flowers, herbs, etc., are mentioned in the Old and/or New Testaments of the Bible. These have been carefully researched to preserve the integrity of the Gardens’ uniqueness.

“The Warsaw/Winona Lake area of Indiana has a long religious history. That history begins perhaps with the Chatauqua times of Winona Lake, now being revived. [Really?] Many other famous historical religious figures made their home’s here, from Homer Rodeheaver to Fanny Crosby to Billy Sunday.”

I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look up the first two of those three. Regardless, it’s a stunning little place.

Go far — always good if you can manage it. But also go near.

The Grundy County Historical Society & Museum

Posted on May 11, 2022 by admin

I did a quick look, and it seems that the Rockwell Inn, a restaurant in Morris, Illinois, closed for good sometime in 2013. I ate there in 1987, returning from Springfield from the first business trip I’d ever taken, and remember the dark interior, the very long and ornate wooden bar that had supposedly been at the 1893 world’s fair, and the fish — some kind of fish — cooked in a bag with almonds and spices, superbly done.

That was the only time I ever ate there. I gave it a moment’s thought after I’d visited the Grundy County Historical Society & Museum on Friday, which is in Morris.

If I’d thought of it while I was at the museum, I could have asked the woman at the desk, the only other person there, whether she remembered the restaurant. She might well have, or even pointed out a Rockwell artifact, though I’m pretty sure that the museum didn’t get the bar. I hope someone got it.

The museum has a lot of other things, though. That’s part of the charm of local, volunteer-run museums. Stuff. Such as items to remind us that Prince Albert is, or was, in a can.

Business machines of yore.

Clothes.

Things that used to be found in middle-class homes.

Farm equipment.

And some items specific to Grundy County industry. Coal has been mined there for a long time, leaving behind tools.

Lots to look at on a rainy, cold spring day, when you have a museum all to yourself.

Mishawaka Walks

Posted on April 27, 2022 by admin

Worth noting: U.S. Grant was born 200 years ago today in Point Pleasant, Ohio. There hasn’t been a presidential birth bicentennial since Lincoln’s in early 2009, which came on the heels of Andrew Johnson’s in late 2008.

Later this year, there will be another one: Rutherford B. Hayes, born in Delaware, Ohio on October 4, 1822. One cold day in the mid-1990s, I dropped by the Hayes home museum in Fremont, Ohio, sparking an interest in presidential sites that hasn’t abated. Good old RBH. President most likely to be mistaken for Benjamin Harrison in a lineup. After his bicentennial, it won’t happen again till Chet Arthur has his day in 2029.

The St. Joseph River flows mostly westward through Michigan and into Lake Michigan, but it bends into Indiana at South Bend and its twin town, Mishawaka. Until recently I gave little thought to Mishawaka as a destination, but then I learned about its riverwalks. We arrived late in the morning on Sunday to sample one of them, the walk along the budding-verdant Kamm Island Park.

Downtown Mishawaka seemed fairly pleasant as well. It reminded me of some of the towns along the Fox River in Illinois — Aurora, say, or St. Charles, both of which hug a mid-sized river and consider it an amenity.

As well they should. Some views of Kamm Island Park.

New development has come to the area. Not sure I’d want to live there, but I’d probably get a kick out of renting one of the units for a few days.

One curiosity on Kamm Island that I didn’t think to take pictures of: the fact that small, colorful figurines and other items, plastic and ceramic, stand at the base of many of its trees. No group is the same. A planned art project or spontaneous whimsy? Homage to elves or the work of elves?

Across the river at Kamm Island is Battell Park, the city’s oldest park, which has its own trail and some features not found elsewhere, namely a rock garden built by the WPA. This is the view of the lower level of the rock structure.

After lunch, which consisted of takeout Chinese from a storefront near UI South Bend eaten at the picnic shelter of a windy park near the Potawatomi Zoo, we stopped at Battell Park for a look at the upper level of the rock garden. Water must flow through its channels some of the year, down to the river, but looks like it hasn’t started for the season quite yet. Still, it’s an impressive work.

As much as I laud the CCC — whose works I keep encountering, some stunning — I have to put in a word for the WPA and its wide legacy too. I grew up with one of its finest projects — the San Antonio Riverwalk — as well as our high school stadium, which once upon a time had a plaque denoting it as a WPA project. This is an excellent site for browsing its projects, along with the rest of the visible New Deal.

Upstream a mile or so from Battell is Merrifield Park, also in Mishawaka. That was the last place we visited in town before heading home, because we wanted to see one of the park’s smaller features, Shiojiri Garden (Shiojiri Niwa), dedicated in 1987. Small but enchanting.

“This garden was a gift to the city of Mishawaka from its sister city, Shiojiri (Nagano Prefecture, Japan),” Atlas Obscura notes. “The designer was Shoji Kanaoka, the same man who planned the Japanese gardens at the Epcot Center in Florida. It features a multitude of trees and flowers, including a grove of cherry trees. There are also two snow lanterns, four bridges, and a teahouse pavilion built in the traditional Japanese style.”

Nice. You might call it a pocket Japanese garden, and Mishawaka — and the world — are better for it.

A Short Stop in Pontiac

Posted on March 23, 2022 by admin

We took Ann back to school Sunday before last, the first day of Daylight Saving Time, and since the day was tolerably warm, I insisted on a short stop in Pontiac, Illinois.

Despite Pontiac being on I-55 between Chicago and St. Louis, a route I’ve driven countless times, I’d never stopped there before, unlike such places as Coal City, Dwight, Lincoln, Atlanta, Litchfield and Mount Olive, just to name some of the smaller burgs along the way.

We didn’t spend that much time there. But time enough for us to walk all the way around the Livingston County Courthouse, which is impressive indeed.

It’s the county’s third courthouse; the first was a small wood-frame structure replaced by the second, which burned down in 1874 (pics of the two are here). Architect John C. Cochrane of Chicago, who also designed the Illinois and Iowa state capitols, designed the current Second Empire structure, which was finished in 1875 and restored recently. Technically, it isn’t a courthouse anymore, since the county’s judicial operations relocated to a new building nearby in 2011, but the county still has offices in the older building.

It wouldn’t be an Illinois town of any size without Lincoln acknowledged somewhere, and in the case of Pontiac, it’s a bronze resting on a bronze split-rail fence. It depicts young lawyer Lincoln, who visited the second courthouse periodically.

An Illinois sculptor named Rick Harney completed the work in 2006. Looking at his portfolio, I wonder if it’s easy to access his bronze of Adlai Stevenson in the Central Illinois Regional Airport. Lincoln is fine, but there aren’t that many Stevensons around, even in Illinois.

Looking around the courthouse square, there’s also a less conventional Lincoln.

The inevitable Route 66 mural.

Some handsome buildings from a time when handsome buildings were built in small towns. Before the Depression at the latest, and more likely before WWI.

And a time capsule underfoot.

Looking a little further into that today, I learned that the International Time Capsule Society is a real thing. I knew I got out of bed for a reason.

Main Street, Bloomington

Posted on January 18, 2022 by admin

Seems like the pit of winter has arrived. That’s not necessarily a time of blizzards or ice storms, though it can be. Mainly the pit is unrelenting cold, and some years the pit is deeper than others — more unrelenting, that is.

So far this year, winter has been bleak-midwinter-ish enough, but not viciously so in my neck of North America. There’s still time enough for northern Illinois winter to turn more vicious, of course.

Ann returned to ISU on Sunday, facilitated by me driving her there. It’s a task I don’t mind at all. We had a good conversation en route and listened to music we both like. I won’t go into the details of that right now, but there is a Venn diagram that includes some intersection. Larger than one might think.

Just before I returned her to her dorm and drove home, we visited part of Main Street in Bloomington. It’s an impressive block. Bloomington should be glad it has survived down to the present.

Not only survived, but the buildings are home to one kind of shop or another, mostly nonchain specialty retailers. In fact, all nonchain as far as I could see.

The 400 block of Main between Market and Monroe Sts. has the strongest concentration of late 19th-century commercial structures, with facades looking well-maintained in our time.

Featuring artwork from our time as well.

Not a lot of plaques that I saw, but I did spot one.

An organization that’s still very much around, but these days, the Harber Building is home to Illinois Tattoo. Ralph Smedley lived quite a long time (1878-1965), mostly in California, where the organization really took off.

Over a storefront occupied by Ayurveda for Healing, which promises a “holistic path for wellness and optimal health,” there’s a remarkable set of metal figures.

Detail.

Ayurveda for Healing, which I assume takes its inspiration from South Asian practices, has three locations, including this one in Bloomington, along with Chicago and Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Just a block over, the 500 block of Main isn’t what it used to be. This is what it used to be, in an image borrowed from the McLean County Museum of History.

This is what I saw, let’s say roughly 90-odd years later.

To take that image of the mural, I was standing in a parking lot where a Montgomery Ward store used to be. Too bad for what has been lost, but fragments are mostly what we have of the past anyway, and it’s good to spot them.

Wright in Dwight, But Also Odd Fellows, Cobb, and a Relic of Quackery

Posted on December 1, 2021 by admin

Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station is on the edge of Dwight, Illinois, not far from the Interstate, and after our short visit on Sunday, Ann and I went further into town, seeking a late lunch. We found it at El Cancun, a Mexican restaurant in the former (current?) Independent Order of Odd Fellows building, dating from 1916. Looks like the orange of the restaurant has been pasted on the less-colorful IOOF structure.

I didn’t notice IOOF on the building until after lunch, so I didn’t think to ask the waiter about the building, though I did notice that the restaurant space, whose walls were large and colorfully painted, had a gray ceiling that evoked the late 19th/early 20th century. Maybe once upon a time it was a meeting room or bar for the Odd Fellows of greater Dwight.

Even if I’d asked the waiter, I’m not sure he would have known. Got the impression he didn’t grow up in these parts. He was eager to upsell me a margarita, however. I declined. Had the enchiladas verdes, which were quite good, and a classic teetotaler beverage, water.

The IOOF building is across the street from the back of Dwight’s historic railroad station, now a museum. This is the front.

About the depot, more info is easily available. “As with other neighboring central Illinois towns, Dwight began as a locomotive watering stopover,” explains The Great American Stations (now that’s an interesting web site).

“The Chicago and Mississippi Railroad sent surveyors in the early 1850s to this prairie location, and while the stop was just two small buildings and a water tank, James Spencer, Richard Price Morgan, John Lathrop and the brothers Jesse and Kersey Fell of Bloomington participated in laying out a town that they would name for Henry Dwight, who had funded most of the building of this section of the railroad.

“Dwight began growing rapidly in the 1870s, with significant railroad traffic through to Chicago from St. Louis, and the town hired Henry Ives Cobb to design their larger, grander railroad depot.”

Jesse Fell, by golly. Him again. He was definitely a big fish in the little pond of central Illinois.

As for Cobb, he designed the wonderful Newberry Library in Chicago and the phallic but interesting Yerkes Observatory in southern Wisconsin, among many other things.

But for big-name architecture, Cobb’s work isn’t Dwight’s star attraction. That would be the modest Frank Lloyd Wright bank building facing the front of the station. FLW was trying to smash that pre-FDIC paradigm of grand bank buildings, it seems.

Known as the Frank L. Smith Bank when built in 1905, it’s now the Dwight Banking Center of Peoples National Bank of Kewanee. I like the old name better: Frank’s Bank. How many of us get to have our own banks?

Next to the bank is the Fox Development Center, a state-owned facility for treating people with various unfortunate conditions.

Pretty spiffy for a government structure, eh? Originally it was one of the buildings owned by the Keeley Institute, built in 1891 and rebuilt after a fire in 1902 in its current brick-and-stone Greek revival style.

I wasn’t familiar with the Keeley Institute. Here’s the long and short of it: there was a patent medicine for everything in the late 19th century, and the product of one Leslie Keeley, a small town doc, promised to cure alcoholism with injections and liquids to drink. His cure containing a substance whose exact formula was a secret, though Keeley asserted it contained the element gold in one form or another.

Not too many people believed that, but a lot of people believed the Gold Cure might just work, enough to make Keeley a fortune and open up locations around the world that lasted well into the 20th century. The institute’s international HQ was in Dwight.

Curing alcoholism with injections might seem odd to us, but actual medicine was only just beginning to separate itself from patent medicine in those days.

“I will take any liquor habitue there, soddened and saturated by twenty years of alcoholic debauch, sober him in two hours, cut short his worst spree in four hours, take him from inebriety to perfect sobriety without nervous shock or distress, and leave him antipathetic to alcoholic stimulants of every sort and kind inside of three days,” Keeley said of his treatment. He also developed “cures” for opium addition and nervous exhaustion. Ah, if only it were that easy.

Note the slogan on this ad for the Gold Cure.

We Belt The World. Though it’s a little hard to see, that same slogan is still above the entrance of the Fox Development Center, wrapped around a globe in the pediment.

More about Keeley and the Gold Cure is here. Fascinating the things you find on the road.

Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station

Posted on November 30, 2021 by admin

The National Park Service takes more of an interest in the former U.S. 66 than I would have thought. On this page, the NPS lists dozens of historic sites associated with that road, including 12 in Illinois plus a listing on “Illinois Road Segments.”

One of the sites is Ambler’s Texaco Gas Station in Dwight, Illinois, which is about half way between the northwest suburbs and Bloomington-Normal. On the way back to take Ann to ISU on Sunday, we stopped there.

Though called Amber’s by the park service, the name on site is the Ambler/Becker Station, and the NPS does mention the facility’s other designations over the decades it was a gas station (1933 to 1999): Vernon’s Texaco Station and Becker’s Marathon Gas Station.

After the place ended its existence as a car-care facility, it became a tourist attraction. Sure enough, we’d been attracted for a look, though it was closed on Sunday afternoon.

“With the help of a $10,400 matching grant from the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program, the Village of Dwight painstakingly restored the station to its former glory, taking the main office and canopy area back to the 1930s and the service bay area back to its 1940s appearance,” the NPS says. “Today, the station serves as a visitor’s center for the Village of Dwight.”

La Salle Churches

Posted on November 29, 2021 by admin

After our walk at Matthiessen State Park on Friday, we went to the town of La Salle and found a mid-afternoon lunch at a sandwich shop called Obee’s. Good sandwiches and chili, too.

Rather than head home right away, we stopped to look at a few of La Salle’s sizable church buildings. None of them were open, but the afternoon light illuminated their exteriors nicely.

First stop: Queen of the Holy Rosary Memorial Shrine.

Once a parish church, these days Queen of the Holy Rosary is a Diocesan Shrine dedicated to Mary in memory of all U.S. veterans. Designed by Arthur F. Moratz of Bloomington, it dates only from the 1950s. A late work for him. I’ve run across Moratz before; he did the Normal Theater.

Not far away (nothing is too far away in La Salle) is St. Patrick’s, a much older church, completed in 1848 to serve the Irishmen working on the I&M Canal. One Patrick Joseph Mullaney did the design.

According to a plaque on the front, St. Patrick’s is the “oldest living parish church in Illinois.” With a resplendent interior, from the looks of these pictures.

Elsewhere in La Salle is a church building that had the look of being closed. Permanently closed, that is.

St. Joseph’s, according to a stone in the wall, dedicated in 1907.

More remarkably, the cornerstone lists the architect: Henry Schlacks, whose work I’ve seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an architect mentioned on the exterior of a church, but he was a pretty big bug among church designers more than 100 years ago.

In any case, St. Joseph’s isn’t listed as an active parish by the local Catholic church, and there isn’t any evidence that any other denomination occupies the place.

On the other hand, St. Hyacinth looks active. Just not open when I happened by.

St. Patrick was originally for Irish immigrants, while St. Hyacinth was for Polish immigrants, a later wave to this part of Illinois. It was completed in 1892 to replace an earlier church that burned down, and was also designed by another prolific church architect, George P. Stauduhar.

I could see other steeples off in the distance, since La Salle is still a low-rise town, and steeples are often the tallest structures around. But the light was fading and the afternoon getting chillier, so we called it a day after Hyacinth.

Illinois Wesleyan University

Posted on October 13, 2021 by admin

College campuses, at least when the weather is temperate, have a lot to recommend them as walking destinations. Green space with expansive trees, good-looking or at least interesting buildings, the possibility of public art, inexpensive museums sometimes, a youthful vibe but also historical tidbits, and overall no admission charge.

And the certain knowledge that you (I) don’t have to show up for class, finish assigned reading or write papers. That’s all done.

Before we dropped Ann off at her dorm on Sunday and returned home, we all took a stroll through Illinois Wesleyan University, which is in Bloomington, though not to far south of ISU. I’m glad to report that its motto is still in Latin.

Even better, I knew what it meant without looking it up because of the long-ago Latin teaching efforts of Mrs. Quarles and Dr. Nabors. But I have to say that even a little knowledge of the etymologies of the English words “science” and “sapient” would be enough to guess “knowledge” and “wisdom.”

Illinois Wesleyan, which as far as I can tell is only tenuously connected to the Methodist church, is pleasantly green though not quite the arboretum that is ISU.