Road overkill: Indiana oddities

Offbeat attractions: middle-of-road grave, square doughnuts

By Julie Young

Associated Press

They run the gamut from cheap and tacky to mildly amusing to downright peculiar. You don't usually find them in AAA tour books; they're not rated and they come with no guarantees.

They're the offbeat tourist attractions, and Indiana -- like most states -- has plenty of them.

Darwin , Minn. , has the ``world's biggest ball of twine.'' Chicago has a giant built out of plastic barrels, and the Poconos are home to the Oscar Mayer ``Wiener mobile.''

Indiana 's range from a grave in the road to peculiar pastries.

Driving through Indiana 's Amity, near Franklin , motorists need to pay special attention. The grave of Nancy Barnett sits smack in the middle of Hill's Camp Road , a country road near a cornfield.

Barnett had been dead more than 65 years when county officials decided to widen the road in 1901 and move the cemetery that sat along the banks of Sugar Creek. In protest, Barnett's grandson, Daniel O. Doty, sat atop his grandma's grave with a shotgun. Eventually, they built the road around Barnett, and she rests there to this day.

The small berg of Milltown, 30 miles west of Louisville , is home to the Shoe Tree. It's not a closet accessory, but a real tree adorned with hundreds of pair of shoes.

According to Oddball Indiana : A Guide to Some Really Strange Places , by Jerome Pohlen ( Chicago Review Press, $13.95), people first noticed a pair of shoes hanging from the branches of the tree about 25 years ago. It became popular for folks to tie their laces together and hurl their footwear into history.

St. Louis may have its arch, and those hankering for an oddity en route to a Missouri vacation might want to stop in Terre Haute for another of Indiana 's curiosities: square doughnuts. The logic behind the bakers at the city's three Square Donut shops is that square doughnuts maximize the number of pastries on a preparation tray. Oddly enough, the people who bring forth such a revolutionary idea can only make round doughnut holes.

In Lafayette , the Pizza King franchise has high carpeted booths, individual coin-operated televisions and tableside phones for placing orders. A toy train runs along the booths to deliver drinks to the tables.

Books on curious roadside attractions abound. Pohlen has written a series of his ``Oddball'' guides for other states ( Colorado , Florida , Illinois , Minnesota and Wisconsin ), and there are even other books about Indiana 's unusual places: Dick Wolfsie's Indiana Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff and Phyllis Thomas' Indiana: Off the Beaten Path , both $13.95 from Globe Pequot Press.

Web sites devoted to the peculiar, including www.roadsideamerica.com , have message boards, chat rooms and descriptions of locales that could inspire a few creative destinations.

Of course, one way to find the truly unique is to simply soak up some local color and ask around. The only problem with this, Wolfsie said, is that after years of living near curiosities, people stop noticing them.

"They see it every day, so it's not odd,'' he said.