Columns

ChrisZimmer

GuestColumnist

Although summer temperatures have been hot, work involving management of the Hoosier National Forest has been going well.

Annual breeding bird surveys were completed in June on the Hoosier under an agreement with Purdue University. About 500 selected plots were visited to document all birds seen or heard there. For the first time, survey sites include non-forested areas, such as grasslands and openings managed as early-successional habitats for wildlife. A few areas also include wetlands.

Andrea Neal

Guest

Columnist

Two decades after Elwood Haynes drove his newfangled horseless buggy down a Kokomo street, cars had become all the rage in Indiana.

“From the beginning, Hoosiers loved cars,” historian James H. Madison writes in “Hoosiers – A New History of Indiana.” They loved driving them, and they loved making them.

TIM KLOEPPEL

GUEST COLUMNIST

The upcoming presidential election is, in my opinion, the most important in our nation’s history. It will essentially be a referendum on whether or not the United States is what our founders intended it to be.

STEPHEN SAALMAN

GUEST COLUMNIST

It is a historical fact that on the rainy night of May 8-9, 1825, the steamboat, Mechanic, sank in the Ohio River with the Marquis de Lafayette aboard. Several varying narratives of the shipwreck, have been recorded, and each makes separate claims to the authenticity.

First, a brief sketch of the official legend, from Thomas De la Hunt’s “History of Perry County,” written in 1916, 91 years after the shipwreck.