State Road 67 is the longest State Road in Indiana. It originally connected Vincennes, a very old city on the Wabash River at the Illinois border, to Indianapolis to Muncie, a city northeast of Indianapolis that’s about 30 miles from the Ohio border.
SR 67 was named in 1926 as part of a highway renumbering triggered by the arrival of the US highway system.
From 1919 to 1926, a different network of state highways existed. Routings and numbers changed frequently in those years, and roads were being newly signed as state roads all the time. Most of what would become SR 67 was in the state highway system in 1919, but not all of it, and not as one continuous route. The 1923 official state highway map shows the road that would become SR 67 routed as SR 12 from Indianapolis to Vincennes and SR 37 from Indianapolis to Muncie.
All of this used existing roads; the state just routed these highways over them. They painted the route numbers on utility poles along the way.
The road from Indianapolis to Vincennes was largely routed over The Vincennes State Road, part of an 1830s network of state-funded roads that connected Indianapolis to other important cities in Indiana. The road from Indianapolis to Pendleton followed a local road called the Pendleton Pike. That road still bears this name in part of Indianapolis. I haven’t been able to determine whether the road from Pendleton to Muncie was laid out over any significant or historic roads.
In the 1926 renumbering, Indiana adopted a numbering scheme where east-west highways got even numbers that ascended from north to south, and north-south highways got odd numbers that progressed from east to west. It’s why you find SR 2 in northern Indiana and SR 66 in southern Indiana, SR 1 in eastern Indiana and SR 63 in western Indiana.
A few roads don’t fit this scheme, and SR 67 is one of them. When this road was numbered, it was hoped that US 67 would be routed through Indiana along this route. But US 67 ended up going through Illinois instead.
Today, SR 67 still begins in Vincennes, but has been extended past Muncie to the northeast to end at the Ohio state line northeast of Portland. It has been significantly rerouted from Muncie to Anderson, and now skirts Indianapolis on its I-465 beltway.
It has also been improved multiple times from Indianapolis to Vincennes, leaving behind a treasure trove of old alignments. On two Saturdays in October, 2022, I explored as many of them as I could find. I’ll share what I found as I found it along the road in many posts to come.
I made this road trip in memory of Richard Simpson, who before he passed away wrote the terrific Indiana Transportation History blog. He and I had talked about doing this part of SR 67 together one day. We didn’t get it done before he died. But I was able to rely on his great research into this road and its original route, which he detailed in this post.
This series will start two Fridays from now, after a special post next Friday.
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