Discover Indianapolis Indiana

Travel with Bennett-Watt and discover the city of Indianapolis in Indiana.

Discover Indianapolis Indiana Jim Watt: Indiana and specifically Indianapolis used the crossroads of America more major highways intercepting Indiana than anywhere else in America. The capital of Indiana perhaps the entire state is most famous for its Memorial Day in the 500 race. Began May 30, 1911 it was the first long distance auto race in America. Jim Watt: Indianapolis is a beautiful city that is survived urban plight to the suburbs with grace and style like River State Park is an open manicured green space in the city. The frontline if you will for NCAA headquarters and the tall of champions. Local college says basketball is the king of sports in Indiana. Along the Ohio River Indiana’s southern boundary many towns turn their backs on the river but in most cases was their reason for being. Fortunately, in the late 20th century residents begin to realize their Water Park potential. Marilee Fowler: We are in the southwest corner of Indiana, just looking at here is the Ohio River and it is a boundary between us and Kentucky so you cross the bridge here in Kentucky but if you also travel about 30 miles west during Illinois. So we call this the tri-state area. The town is an old river town, a lot of industry and a lot of wealth obviously when you look around and see a lot of these beautiful old Victorian homes in the late 1800’s so it is grown up commercially around this river and for a lot of years this river was kind of ignored. We kind of turned our back to it and it’s then probably in about past 10 to 15 years this community has realized is probably the best resorts that we have and we’ve totally done our river front area. And as we have people traveling up and down the river they always tell us that this probably are the most beautiful river fronts that they see as they travel. Jim Watt: Evansville’s Four Freedoms Monument was part of this community’s Renaissance. Marilee Fowler: When you visit the monument, there are the four pillars of the freedoms that we’ve recognized and I think we’re really called our attention during World War II. There’s also a pillar for every state in the union and it gives a little bit of history of that state and when it came in to the union so I always say that’s a wonderful thing to go down there. I brought it many times. Every time I do it I see something different I didn’t see before and it’s a great thing for people only just to come in and just enjoy and remember that part of history. Mike Linderman: Up river just a bit Angel Mount historical site, this is the world famous angel site. This little Mississippi inside occupy between the years 1100 and 1450 roughly. We know by 1450 it is pretty well abandoned. Mississippi in culture flourished up and down the Mississippi valley. This is probably one of the farthest eastern location for the Mississippi in culture and we had about 3000 people living here on a little over 100 acres for about 350 years and Mississippi in culture is basically they build mounds of status. These are more likely crankier pyramids of the top 10 off and we build structures on top to elevate the riff. For those we flat they were really and 90% of the community would have lived out off of the mountains. But it was a very large community and the largest in the state of Indiana. Chris Peebles: We are in the second of three years of archeological excavation here, very small scale excavations that are meant to help the staff here at Angel Mounts National Historic site interpret better. Interpreting greater detail what went on her between about 1100 and about 1488. Over the last five years we have taken a pine scale magnetometry map of this entire site, 3.6 million points measured magnetic moment that each of those parts deflections in the earth’s magnetic field. So basically, the gross features which are not visible on the circus, houses, large pits, things like that are visible to the magnetometer. We have chosen three units in which to do archeology that will better interpret this site but the whole project is to better preserve the site. Mike Linderman: If it wasn’t for the archeology we would know very well about this site other than we get some big homes out there. Archeology starts to polish up what we have and give us much more detail on what actually happened here.