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Converted from paper version of the Broad Ripple Gazette (v03n11)
The History of Broad Ripple: Families of Old Broad Ripple: The Featherstons - part four - by Paul Walker
posted: Jun. 02, 2006

The History of Broad Ripple header

by Paul Walker

The three previous articles told about the Featherston and Totman families and their church. This article features the land on which it was built, near 66th Street between Ferguson Street and Cornell Avenue. We were pleased to meet Denzil Featherston Totman and her daughter Barbara at the most recent History Saturday meeting.

Grandpa's 1913 Maxwell sat behind our house in the alley. A huge car, with wheels as tall as a 6-year old child, it sported a bulb horn and carbide headlights. It was a right hand drive vehicle, and a fun place for kids to play. My brother Tom reportedly drove it sixty miles per hour. Dad sold it for junk to aid the war effort, since it was all aluminum and brass. It would be worth $300,000 today in the same condition it was then.
The site of the Broad Ripple Lighthouse Tabernacle which was behind our house and the alley extended east to Bellefontaine Street, a one-lane gravel trail running along the Monon tracks north over the levee into the "camps" [where the Indianapolis Art Center now is]. To the north of the lot was another half acre, heavily wooded, where men trapped fur-bearing animals and hunted rabbits and squirrels for food with rifles. (Shotguns were not used as they tore up any game sought for augmenting the grocery bill.) No one worried about firing guns in the city limits, nor did they know if there was such an ordinance. The area around the pond was good for trapping, likewise. Earl Augustine and others skinned what they trapped, and I remember seeing the skins turned inside out stretched on specially shaped boards to cure. Furriers would buy the cured furs.

The Broad Ripple Lighthouse Tabernacle congregation in front of the 66th Street church.
The Broad Ripple Lighthouse Tabernacle congregation in front of the 66th Street church.
image courtesy of Denzil Featherston


The pond was a popular fishing spot. In a previous article I reported being with Herbert Hoover when he set the dumps on fire. It burned over a week from the methane gas coming out of the garbage.
In the middle of this God-forsaken plot, before the church was built, was a weathered, neglected, gnarled, old apple tree; the apples of which were not worth picking. In one corner of this area Herbert Hoover and I dug a cave and found that under two feet of dirt lay pure, deep sand. We tunneled back under the dirt bank, which, had it caved in, would have eliminated the young Mr. Hoover and Mr. Walker.
Years later when I moved back to Indianapolis from California I found a beautiful stone church in this area. The plot of ground was no longer God-forsaken.

The End.



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