I seldom document old roads within the city of Indianapolis. I usually find that there’s no good place to put my car, traffic is too heavy for my safety, and/or the area is sketchy. This is a shame, because these old routes are worth documenting.
In 1926, State Road 67 passed right through Indianapolis. It’s easy to assume that it followed Kentucky Avenue, a road that cuts diagonally through southwest Indianapolis. It did come to follow that road eventually. But parts of its current route didn’t exist in 1926. It was instead routed over the Mooresville Road, which was part of the 1830s Vincennes State Road.
Richard Simpson laid out the original route of SR 67 over current maps in 2020. The black portions of the route are still drivable; the orange portions are not. Mooresville Road and Kentucky Avenue followed the same routing until the community of Maywood, when they diverged.
I probably could have started documenting the original route once I reached I-465. The road out there is not so heavily traveled, and is more suburban and rural than urban. But there’s just not a lot to see — it’s just a road.
However, I should have stopped to document the community of West Newton. Unfortunately, I got turned around there and became quite frustrated. Once my car and I were again on SR 67’s original route, I just gassed it out of there.
Photographs begin in Mooresville. The next installment of this road-trip report begins there.
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