Blackhawk (Pierson Township) (900?) Built 1953
October 14, 2025
Last night I was lamenting to my wife that I don't have any consistent research to do anymore on the old gyms in our state, at least not in discovering them. It seems like once a week something will come up that I look into a little bit, but for about a year and a half I was on an almost nightly treasure hunt in the evenings after the kids went to bed to see what old gyms are still standing. That continuous search kept me energized, I miss it. Once I finished researching every current and former Hoosier school that ever played in the IHSAA, I figured I probably found about all of them. I was very mistaken. It seems like every month or more something I inevitably missed pops up, but now it's not due to my own efforts, but from the gracious help of others. My buddy Ted from Hiding in Plain Sight has sent me numerous old gym finds over the last few months. Richard Tekulve has helped me out so much with the research he has already done and continues to do. Cliff Pappe has posted pictures of gyms he's visited that I didn't even know existed (I seriously jumped out of my chair when I realized the old Ireland gym is still around when I saw his post). I continue to run across photos from Greg Alexander's travels that have unearthed new finds. People will also just message me out of the blue and turn me on to a place I had no clue even existed. This happened earlier last year when Scott Fulk let me know about a small gym located in a tiny town nestled in Vigo County.
The town of Blackhawk consists of 3-4 small side streets that branch off of State Road 159 in Pierson Township. There are some houses, an agriculture business, a volunteer fire department, and a long building with a rounded roof that sits far enough off the state road you would never even know it was there unless you were looking for it. This building is the former gym, and only remaining remnants of what used to be Blackhawk High School. The Blackhawk Chieftans played in this gym from 1953 until 1961 when the school was consolidated into Honey Creek (which would later be consolidated into Terre Haute South, which is about to be consolidated again into whatever they're going to call the new Terre Haute high school. Three consolidations for one town!). My guide for the day, Mrs. Sheila Mitchell, showed me some pictures of the old high school building that used to be attached, and it was truly a grand old building. It was razed sometime in the 70s judging by old aerial pictures you can find online. Over the last few decades, the gym has served as a community center for the people of Blackhawk and the surrounding area. Since the pandemic, community functions at the gym have lessened, but it has also found new life as a tennis training facility for local players over at Sullivan High School. During the cold months it gets so much use that they even put in a legitimate tennis court surface. Off to the side of the court, Mrs. Mitchell and her husband (who are the primary caretakers of the facility at this point) have organized a really neat Blackhawk Chieftan memorabilia area. There are old photos, school sweaters, yearbooks, and much more displayed. While the Chieftans never brought home a sectional title, it is very evident that they had a lot of community support and school spirit backing them each year.
While the space is primarily used for tennis now, its past life as a raucous high school basketball venue is still very present. The rounded wood roof with beautiful arched beams that reach all the way to the floor in the style of the Medaryville and Pleasantville is a dead giveaway that the gym is a child of the 50s. It used to have permanent seating along each sideline that was taken out when the gym was used as a factory for a period of time. Now there are some normal sets of wooden retractable bleachers that go up six rows. I'm guessing that's about how many rows of seating there were with the original bleachers. There's about six feet of space between the top of the bleachers and where the rounded roof ends at the top of the wall. That space is lined from end to end on both sides with rectangular windows. A few of them were covered with blinds when I was there, but from the outside it gives the place a cool look.
The baseline wall opposite of the main entrance is pretty bare except for a neat American flag that looks like it was crocheted (or some other form of this, a sewing connoisseur I am not). The baseline wall along the main entrance is also empty, but it does have a small rectangular opening that open looks like a tray return in a cafeteria, though I don't think that was the purpose it served. It also has doors to where the locker rooms would have been. A kitchen for the community center now sits behind this wall. A cool Chieftan head logo can be found up on one wall along with an old timey scoreboard elsewhere in the gym. One little mystery in the gym is the basketball hoops themselves. They look like the more modern wooden variety painted white with red trim. I would expect a gym built in the 50s to have glass backboards. Maybe they were taken out and replaced at some point, or maybe these are oddly the originals. I'm unsure.
On my way into Blackhawk I drove through Pimento. I passed a bare patch of grass with a circle drive. "That looks like a place that could have been a school site," I thought to myself. It turns out I was right. Pimento had just lost their old high school and gym to a fire a few years before. I later found out through Mr. Tekulve that a former Pimento alumnus was actually working on restoring the gym inside the school when it was a community center in the early 2000s, but that the work stopped with his passing. Eventually fire destroyed the structure, and now only a monument put up recently by alumni stands in its place. This a tale that is all too familiar to me now as I've researched the old gyms in so many of these small towns. If a purpose cannot be found for them, they start to fade away, and eventually they're lost forever. A monument also stands outside the old Blackhawk gym honoring the school that once stood proudly beside it. The difference is that a big piece of the Blackhawk community's heart is still here. It still has a purpose. As long as that's the case, I think that heart will continue to beat for a long time.
