Greensburg Armory (650?) Built 1929
June 20, 2026
Research can be frustrating. I feel like I've gotten so much better at it since I've started this blog, but I'm still learning new things all the time. I've learned a lot from friends like Ted Shideler and Richard Tekulve who I look up to as fellow Indiana historians. Learning how to search old online articles and historic aerial photos has been a game changer for me, but every once in a while I'm reminded that the internet still has its limits. When I exhaust all my known avenues, I try and turn to local people for help. The only problem there is that the questions I'm seeking answers to usually require knowledge of time periods 50-100 years ago. It's hard finding the right people to talk to who were alive back then, and I've found that sometimes their memories aren't always as crystal clear as they might think. Just this week I've been trying to nail down some information about a potential old gym in Sweetser, and no one seems to know what was going on with the basketball team there before 1960. It can be very deflating. The one other mystery I've been trying to solve unsuccessfully recently is the history of the old armory gym in Greensburg.
I first found out about this place when I visited the old Greensburg High School gym about a year ago. Since then I've been told by more than one person that different rural high schools around Decatur County used the gym for their home games periodically over the years for various reasons. Either they never had a gym, it hadn't been built yet, or the one they had was deemed to small in later years. The latter was the case for Burney High School. This is the only instance I've been able to nail down for certain thanks to the help of some locals. Burney had a very small gym that they outgrew, so in the 60s they moved their home games to the armory until the school consolidated into South Decatur in 1968. I've been told there were more cases of similar things happening at the armory in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, but I don't have any concrete details. If you know of any, please reach out! At the end of the day though, I've been able to confirm that the old armory gym was the designated home for some high school basketball teams in Indiana, so it counts! And I'm glad it does, because it's a neat old place to visit.
The armory was built in 1929 to serve as, well, an armory! It just so happened that these facilities sometimes doubled as decent basketball venues. I know that Madison, Delphi, and Kempton all had similar situations, and I'm sure there were more. The Greensburg armory has been used by the Decatur County Parks and Recreation department for awhile now. It's used by weightlifters, basketball players, and of course, pickleballers. A pickleball party was going on when I stopped by on a brutally hot June morning after I met my sister halfway to Cincinnati to take my two boys to hang out for the weekend. I tried to be discreet as I tiptoed around their games to take pictures of the gym, but I'm sure I probably seemed weird. Not ideal photography conditions, but I was able to get a few decent pictures. The place doesn't seem to look too far from what it did when it opened 97 years ago. The original bleachers that would have lined the sidelines are long gone, metal ones have replaced them. It looks like there would have been room for about 5 rows on each side back in the day. The big old square windows that line the sideline walls are still in place, but covered with curtains. There's a short porch over the bleacher areas that angle up slightly before rising straight up to the slightly arched roof. The big metal support beams that would've obstructed some views of the court and scared some players rushing for loose balls give the place some real character. The baseline wall opposite of the entrance is completely bare. The wall where you enter the gym has an old practice hoop hanging from it. It also has a small wooden balcony/perch of some sort with old wooden doors that would lead to the front of the building which contains a few classrooms and offices. I'm not sure what purpose it served, but it looks cool. There's a few other neat doors and entrances around the place as well.
I don't have as much description here as usual, and that's not a knock on this place at all. I mean it wasn't even built to primarily serve as a basketball gym. It was meant to serve the community in other ways first. What I respect is that it has continued to serve the community in a variety of ways all these years. I just wish I had a better sense of what some of those ways were in the early years. I'm going to keep talking to people, and hopefully I'll find the right one eventually who can help me fill in some of the gaps. Until then I'll just enjoy the memory of the morning I got to stop by. I may not have had as much fun as the pickleball posse, but it still stirred something inside of me to want to learn more about its story. It's a story that I hope still has some chapters left to be written. I guess there are rumors that when/if the parks department moves out, the armory's future could be in jeopardy. That would be a shame for historians and pickleballers everywhere.
