Paris Crossing (400?) Built 1953
October 14, 2024
October 14, 2024
Paris. When you hear the name, the first thing that comes to mind is often extravagance or opulence in some form. Not exactly things that are typically associated with Indiana. The town of Paris Crossing though is associated with something that is very Indiana indeed: railroads. Like many towns across the state in the 1800s, it was formed and named due to its proximity to a stop along the tracks, in this case a crossing just outside the town of Paris which is now also unincorporated. In its heyday it was a bustling town, enough to warrant its own high school up through 1961 when consolidation reared its ugly head. Driving past the old gym now, all you will find in town is a volunteer fire department, a post office (which is surprising considering not many communities this size still have one), and a church. It may not be much, but the community spirit is still strong, and it keeps holding on. The gym that sits at the front step of the town matches this description to a T. It may not look like much from the outside, and it may need some TLC on the inside, but it's still hanging on, and it still has a story to tell.
Driving down to Jennings County through southeastern Indiana on a beautiful fall day as the leaves are just starting to turn is a magical experience. The only thing that could have made it better was a visit to a gym that has flown under the radar of way too many people when they start talking about Hoosier gyms of old that are still standing. The Paris Crossing gym sits alone at the top of a hill right as you pull off of State Road 3 a few miles outside of Vernon. It's a barn-like building that used to be attached (and connected to with an underground tunnel!) to a long since demolished school. It's painted white but seems to slowly be fading to grey with the passage of time. Mr. Redmond, the township trustee, was kind enough to show me around and give me some more background on the gym. He showed me outside where the old school building once stood and where you can still see traces of the foundation. As we walked up to the gym, what immediately struck me was the exterior entrance to the basement right between the steps leading up to the gym entrance. I've never seen that before. They both sit under a large overhang. I learned that before the township gained control of the gym about five years ago, it had basically set empty and neglected for a decade. Water sat a few feet high in the basement and the roof started to leak in a few spots. Since then they've been working slowly but steadily to repair the gym to a point that it can be used again for different events. Currently a travel baseball team uses it for indoor practices in the winter. While the inside was setup for baseball, you could still see flashes of it's former glory during the height of Hoosier Hysteria.
The old gym has matching sidelines with four rows of permanent grey wooden bleachers. The top and bottom rows have solid tongue and groove sides to them while the middle two rows are more like bench seats with open sides. The cement wall behind them is painted maroon a few feet up and then white the rest of the way. There used to be big square windows at one point which have since been blocked in. The bleachers don't quite go end to end as they stop right at about the foul line extended on the side of the gym by the main entrance. The two baseline walls are fairly simple and bare. They both have a pentagon shape and rise up to a middle point that meets the center of the roofline. The only distinguishing feature on them is a large wooden square at the top that the basketball hoops are tethered to. In one corner of the gym are interior steps that lead down to the basement and old locker rooms. The original scoreboad is really neat and now sits on the bleachers right next to the original scorer's table. The hardwood floor is nondescript, but notably a little short in both length and width. It has a three point line painted on it, but it is cut off pretty high along the sideline. There are also two 10-second lines to mitigate the fact that the floor doesn't quite reach the standard 84 feet. My favorite detail of all may be that on the back of one of the wooden goals, dozens of students and players over the years signed the backboard, and you can still see the signatures clear as day.
After we checked out the gym, we took an adventure down under to the basement and locker room area. This was the space probably hit hardest by the neglect, but also the place where you could see a lot of potential for community use once it's fixed up. I got to see the older locker rooms, the entrance to the tunnel that once connected to the school, and other rooms and meeting places that once were a hub of community activity. It was easy to think back and imagine what it must have been like when the school was still operating at full swing and the gym was at the center of it all. When the gym was built, there were almost 800 teams participating in the state basketball tournament. About two decades later, that number would be cut in half. So many small towns lost their schools, and in doing so lost their identity and much of the community life.
Mr. Redmond told me throughout my visit of all the work he, his family, and other members of the community have done to stabilize the building after it was left unattended for so many years. He also told me about some of the things they want to do going forward to return it to a place that can be more widely used by the community. It's a long journey. If there's one thing I've learned traveling across the state and looking at these old gyms, nothing is cheap and everything takes a lot of time. I've been fortunate to see the end product of so many gyms that once were left to rot but have since been painstakingly restored. I think of Pleasantville, Middletown, and even the Hoosier Gym itself. The work at Paris Crossing isn't done, but it was actually really neat to see it in the middle of the rehab process. As they say in all the corny HGTV shows I used to love, it has good bones. You can see the history of what it once was, and you can see the vision for what it hopefully one day can be. It still has a community who cares about it, and that's the most important thing of all.
