Ghost Towns And Ruins · Volume 7
Indiana: The Town That Was Emptied for a Lake That Never Came
Introduction
Indiana is the thinnest of the six chapters, and it is honest to say so. It has one national forest (the Hoosier), no mining country to speak of, and its lost towns were mostly lost to reservoirs rather than to industry. But it has one site that is worth the drive on the strength of its story alone, and the Hoosier’s dispersed-camping rules are the most permissive of any forest in these six states.
7.1 Elkinsville — Brown County, inside the Hoosier National Forest
Access: walk in (national forest land) — but the remaining houses are private and the cemetery is a cemetery.
Founded in the 1850s and named for William Elkins, a pioneer settler. A farming village, unremarkable, in a valley.
In 1964 the federal government took it by eminent domain to make way for the Lake Monroe reservoir, and the residents left.
🔴 THE FINDING, AND IT IS THE BEST ONE IN THIS VOLUME: the lake never reached it. The elevation estimates were wrong. The water stopped short. Elkinsville was emptied for a flood that did not happen, and the valley it stood in was absorbed into the Hoosier National Forest instead.
⭐ That is a different kind of ghost town from anything in Michigan. The Michigan towns died because the thing that paid for them ran out — copper, iron, white pine. Elkinsville did not fail. It was removed, for a reason that turned out not to apply, and the forest simply grew over the space where the argument had been.
What is left: the Elkinsville Cemetery and a few private residences. The site has been almost entirely swallowed by the forest.
⚠ Manage expectations. There is no townsite to walk through. The reason to go is that you are standing in a valley that was cleared of people for nothing, and the forest is the evidence.
7.2 Charles C. Deam Wilderness — Monroe County
Access: walk in. Not a ghost town — included because it is the best public land in the state for this kind of trip and it sits next to Elkinsville.
Nearly 13,000 acres of the Hoosier National Forest, congressionally designated wilderness, with eight trails totalling 36 miles for hiking, backpacking and horses, and 25 designated hike-in/boat-in primitive campsites alongside dispersed camping.
🔴 Designated Wilderness means no vehicles at all — not on trails, not anywhere inside the boundary. This is a place the truck parks at the edge of. For a vehicle-based trip, the Deam is the walk you take from a camp outside it, not the camp itself.
7.3 Still to research
Indiana’s ghost-town lists carry many more names than this volume covers, and none of the others were access-checked. The state’s pattern — small agricultural communities, reservoir takings, no surviving industrial architecture — means the yield per name is likely to be low, but the list has not been worked.
7.4 Where to sleep in Indiana
The Hoosier National Forest has the friendliest dispersed rule of the six states, and it is worth quoting in full because it is unusually generous:
Dispersed camping is allowed throughout most of the Hoosier National Forest on National Forest System lands away from developed campgrounds, nearly anywhere your camping equipment and/or vehicle does not block developed trails or road rights-of-way.
Table 1 — Where to sleep in Indiana
| Rule | Indiana (Hoosier NF) |
|---|---|
| Where | nearly anywhere on NFS land, away from developed campgrounds |
| Setback | at least 200 ft from trails, trailheads, roads, water sources, rock shelters, caves, and historic structures — unless in a designated site |
| Blocking | must not block developed trails or road rights-of-way |
🔴 Read that setback list again, because it contains the trap. The 200-foot buffer applies to historic structures as well as to water. In a forest whose whole draw is that it grew over a town, the very thing you drove down to see is a thing you may not camp within 200 feet of. Visit the site, then go find your camp somewhere else.
⚠ And it is 200 feet from roads, too — the opposite instruction to Michigan’s “within 50 feet of the traveled portion.” Two states, four hours apart, with directly contradictory rules about where a truck may sit overnight. Vol 12 puts them side by side.
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