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BY JANE AMMESON
Times Correspondent | Monday, January 02, 2006 | (No comments posted.)
When I was a student at Indiana University, my friends and I used to drive the winding and twisting roads of the Hoosier National Forest, looking for antique shops and unique places of interest. As we traveled in the forest and along its periphery, farther and farther away from I.U., the roads became narrower, rising up and down, curving here and there until the ride had an almost roller coaster feeling to it.
It was on one such trip that we came across a small town in Brown County named Story, a ghost town of sorts, since no one lived there any more and all that was left of the commercial area was an old abandoned general store and gas pumps with the intriguing feature of being topped by glass crowns.
But, as the saying goes, nothing stays the same, even a ghost town located on the edges of the vast track of the uninhabited Hoosier National Forest. And so, years later, I found myself returning to Story, Ind.
The road was as I remembered it, dipping high and low, narrow enough that there is little or no room for error. But, as I turned the corner that lead into Story, I saw that something had changed. The old general store now had become the Story Inn, a charming restaurant and bed-and-breakfast.
This doesn't mean that the Story Inn had been gentrified to an unrecognizable degree. No, it had retained its somewhat faded and aged allure of years gone by, the tin metal front facade with its mottled colors melding with times past accented by a hitching post, flowers cascading out of window boxes, an old wooden gate leading to the front porch and best of all, at least for me, the red and gold hand-blown glass crowns on top of the gas pumps now set into recesses on the front porch.
The inn is owned by Rick and Angela Hofstetter who bought the place in 1999. Rick Hofstetter, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Indiana University and a law degree from Duke, is an avid preservationist and when he heard that the old inn, which had been restored a few years earlier, was down on its luck, he stepped in.
The couple live in the town of Story, with a population that stands at three but goes up when Hofstetter's four children come to visit.
"It's the best surviving example of a pre-Civil War small Indiana town in existence," Hofstetter says.
Though sleepy doesn't even begin to describe the village now, at one time it bustled. Founded in 1851 by Dr. George Story, it was the largest settlement in the area according to the inn's extensive Web site. Between 1880 and 1929, the village had two general stores, a non-denominational church, a school house, grain mill, sawmill, blacksmith forge, post office and slaughterhouse. But then came the Great Depression.
"Brown County lost half its population between 1930 and '40," Hofstetter says.
As if that wasn't bad enough, in 1960 the United States Army Corps of Engineers flooded nearby land to create Lake Monroe, the second-largest lake in the state. It totally wiped out the nearby town of Elkinsville and the people who lived in Story could no longer travel through there to Bloomington, cutting off easy access to the largest city in the county. Elkinsville Road, the main road in town, now dead ends just west of Story at a fallen iron bridge.
Story's one remaining general store stayed in business until the Nixon administration.
"We think these pumps last were used in the early '70s," says Hofstetter who predicates that guess by the cost of gas -- 40.9 cents a gallon.
In order for it to retain its pre-Civil War incarnation, Hofstetter has made sure that all the work done on the building and the small houses, where early settlers lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and which are now the inn's guest houses, was "faithful to the history of the place." That includes using lumber indigenous to Brown County and produced in a local sawmill and trying, as much as possible, to follow the techniques used by craftsmen from a century ago.
"As long as I have stewardship of this building and this village nothing will change," he says.
How to get there ...
Take I-65 south to Indianapolis to I-465 east to I-65 south to exit 68. Turn right onto Ind. 46 and take that to Ind. 135, turn south. The road leads into Story, Ind.
For more information
Call (812) 988-2273 or visit www.storyinn.com.
What to bring ...
Depending on what you want to do:
* Hiking boots
* Clothes for exploring the woods, canoeing or bikes
* A camera is a must as everything is a photo op down in this part of the state.
You'll like ...
Dining at the inn. The Hofstetters use as much locally produced food as possible including bison, elk, poultry and lamb. They have their own gardens where they grow vegetables and herbs and also have a vineyard. Besides that, they use Brown County produced maple syrup, butter and eggs.
"We don't use anything that is frozen," Hofstetter says. "When you get a salad here in the summer, the greens were picked that day."
Dinner menu entrées include: Dijon and brown sugar-encrusted prime rib with syrah and currant rosemary jus and rainbow trout with cornbread and sausage stuffing, shiitake beurre rouge, haricots verts and mashed sweet potatoes.
Kids will like ...
The ghost of the Story Inn. She's called the Blue Lady and she has been spotted since the old general store was turned into an inn back in the late 1970s. But not to worry, the ghost is benign, if somewhat mischievous.
"We don't know who she is," says owner Rick Hofstetter mentioning that he doesn't believe in her existence but then going on to note that she is most frequently seen in the guest room originally known as the Garden Room since it overlooks the herb garden, but was re-named The Blue Lady.
Hofstetter's wife has even caught a glimpse of her and the couple hypothesize that she is the unidentified woman pictured in the black-and-white portrait hung at the check-in desk.
And don't miss ...
A carriage ride down Elkinsville Road to the old bridge, along the winding country lanes and past the guest houses that once were village homes. Bucky Adams, dressed in 18th-century English carriage garb, is the coachman. For more information, call (812) 988-0502.
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