It’s a warm spring Sunday afternoon in 1921 and you decide to take your family for a nice country drive. Because you live in Indianapolis, all you have to do is get on any of the city’s major roads and head out until you cross the Dandy Trail, a series of roads that toured the county’s fringes, and off you go.
If you live in Indianapolis today you know of I-465, which also rings the county but is no Sunday drive. And if you live on the Northwestside you might know of a three-mile-long road called Dandy Trail, most of which runs alongside Eagle Creek Reservoir. It’s the only remaining evidence of what had been an 88-mile loop.
The Dandy Trail was ambitious undertaking of the Hoosier Motor Club at a time when good roads were not a given. So many roads were made of dirt then, and were passable only in dry weather. The Hoosier Motor Club was one of many organizations nationwide that advocated for the motorist, pressing for roads paved in harder surfaces for all-weather travel.
The Dandy Trail was named for the dog of a Hoosier Motor Club executive. Signs all along the route featured an image of the pooch, as did a 1921 map of the route that the Indiana State Library has preserved.
Not long ago I visited the library and the map to see if I could trace the route on modern Indianapolis streets. Most of the Dandy Trail still exists, except for a portion that was lost when Eagle Creek Reservoir was built. I’m told that a bridge from that segment becomes visible when the reservoir’s water levels are low enough! Here’s the whole route, all laid out for you on Google Maps.
I was pleasantly surprised to find just how much of the Dandy Trail that I drive routinely today. Those roads may have been way out in the boondocks in 1921, but most of them are major modern thoroughfares now and are anything but rural.
Finding this map isn’t what made me write about the Dandy Trail, though. What got me excited enough to do this research and share with you is some early-20th-century photographs from along the trail that I found. I’ll share them in my next post.
One of the roads on that map is the Michigan Road. It was named a State Historic Byway last year. Read that story.
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