May 13, 2023
A drive through the heartland
I landed mid-morning Saturday at the Cincinnati Airport. Interestingly enough, the airport sits across the Ohio River in Kentucky. It was my first time in the bluegrass state. This visit would be brief, however. I immediately drove north, into Ohio—though not before passing by the Creation Museum.
I crossed the Ohio, into its eponymous state. Just a month earlier I had briefly visited another city along the Ohio River in search of state high points. To make things even more confusing, neither Kentucky nor Ohio was my immediate destination.
That distinction would belong to Indiana. A stone’s throw across Ohio’s western border sits Hoosier Hill the Hoosier State’s natural high point.
I drove through a patchwork of forests and farmland. Everything seemed incredibly green. This was springtime East of the Mississippi. Something I hadn’t been immersed in for about three years now.
Hoosier Hill, Indiana
An hour or two into my drive, I arrived at Hoosier Hill. This is a hiking/recreation-focused blog. But Hoosier Hill doesn’t require much of either. You simply park in a gravel lot off a country road, and walk perhaps 20 feet into the woods.
There are state high points that tower thousands of vertical feet above some valley or shoreline. Some are clad in glaciers. Some harbor treacherous weather at their summit.
But other state high points are far more mellow. They may consist of a seemingly imperceptible bump in an otherwise flat or rolling landscape. Hoosier Hill exemplifies this latter type, though it’s not the only one (e.g. KS, RI, FL).
Beneath a canopy of hardwoods, I found a spacious patch of gravel. Around its perimeter, I found a picnic table, mailbox with register, carved boulder, and a benck sponsored by the Highpointers. The bench and mailbox looked almost identical to those at Maryland’s highpoint.
What’s a Hoosier?
Why is Indiana the “Hoosier” state? And what’s a hoosier? The story appears to be muddled. Apparently, the word comes from the North of England and has something to do with hills or highlands. Immigrants from the borderlands (between England and Scotland) settled heavily in the central Appalachians, and the word Hoosier was perhaps a nickname—potentially pejorative—for them.
But how did this then come to have anything to do with Indiana? Indiana is beyond the hills of Appalachia. Some theorize they adopted the phrase in jest (ironically?) before it morphed into something a bit more sentimental and sincere (post-ironic?).
An alternate explanation I find amusing: it’s simply an evolution of the phrase “who’s here?”. Simple enough.
And then I was off. My delightfully underwhelming road trip would continue, with an hour-and-45-minute drive to Ohio’s high point: Campbell Hill.