A Close Encounter with an Overlook of Some Kind
There’s a scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) gets lost looking for Cornbread Road. After a scalding encounter with aliens, Neary follows them to a summit overlooking Harper Valley. It’s not exactly clear if Harper Valley is set in the greater Muncie area, but the scenes just before show a tunnel with a ‘Harper Valley East 3 Miles’ sign and an exit marker for Harper Valley off U.S. Route 40. On the summit, Neary almost hits a boy named Barry who, apparently, ran all the way to the overlook from a Muncie-area farmhouse.
Not knowing that the film was shot elsewhere, I was obsessed with finding Harper Valley as a kid. I remember asking my mother one afternoon if we could go to the valley overlook, to which she replied, “There’s no overlook, Chris. The only hill around here is the one you sled down at McCulloch Park.”
Bummer.
“What about the tunnel?”
“Do you mean the Madison underpass?”
Double bummer.
Even after I got my driver’s license, I spent a significant amount of time in the late ’90s searching for an encounter with an overlook of some kind. The closest I could find was the Muncie Pike, an old road that runs east along the Big Blue River valley from Luray to New Castle. While the river is neither big nor blue, it definitely flows through a valley and Muncie Pike overlooks it for a stretch. So, take that Mom.
But, as it turned out, there’s no Harper Valley. There is, however, a Cornbread Road. It begins in Yorktown, runs due east and terminates at Hoyt Avenue.
As to the origin of the road’s name, Dick Greene once wrote, “at one time there was a grist mill at Hoyt Avenue and Buck Creek…folks for miles around took their corn to the mill to have it ground into meal, and eventually the way they traveled came to be known as the Cornbread Road.”
Early Center Township maps do indeed show a mill at the intersection of Hoyt, Cornbread, and Buck Creek. A mill race was dug just north of the creek’s small bend there, which allowed for a steady source of power. A fire destroyed the mill in 1895.
Also in the original Close Encounters script, just before Neary gets ‘beamburned,’ he was to trace two roads with his fingers on a map and say “Cornbread Road. Middletown Pike.” Middletown Pike is also real, with origins that stretch back to the Pendleton Road.
In 1832 the Indiana General Assembly commissioned the Pendleton Road “from Munceytown in Delaware County…to Middletown in Henry County, thence to Huntsville in Madison County, and to Pendleton in said county.”
We don’t exactly know how the road was constructed, but a postal worker in the 1890s remembered that in 1853, the Pendleton Road “was laid with polls and logs and was pretty rough.” If accurate, this suggests the road was either a ‘plank road’ or a ‘corduroy road.’ Although different in construction, both road types utilized wood for surfacing.
Wood tends to rot in our soggy climate, so in the years that followed the Civil War, county and state officials chartered turnpike companies to construct gravel roads. In Delaware County, the first was the Muncie and Middletown Turnpike Company. After incorporating on June 29, 1866, they built their gravel turnpike along much of the same route as the Pendleton Road. Toll gates existed at where Hoyt now intersects Memorial and where South 300 West ends at State Road 67.
The Muncie-Middletown Pike was originally designed for horses and carts. With its gravel base, it provided easy access to farmers south of Muncie and beyond, although it never was a bustling thoroughfare in its early years. At one time it even bisected the Muncie Driving Park.
For the historically intrigued, the Muncie Driving Park was a horse racetrack built on the farm of Dr. Robert Winton. Today the track is paved with asphalt and bounded by West 9th Street, South Pierce Street, West 11th Street, and South Gharkey Street. But horses did race here in the 1870s. If you don’t believe me, venture out and drive (slowly) through the rounded corners.
Sometime during the Gas Boom, city officials renamed the Middletown Pike to Hoyt Avenue. There isn’t a great deal of reliable info as to why the street was renamed, but a William Hoyt served as 3rd Ward City Council representative in 1882 and a J. Dennis Hoyt represented the same ward in 1887. The Hoyt surname appears occasionally throughout our county’s history.
Unlike Roy Neary’s odyssey, not every search ends in success. But when we do dead end in a valley of nothing, sometimes the journey provides perspective nonetheless.
First published in the Muncie Star Press, June 9, 2019: https://www.pal-item.com/story/news/local/2019/06/09/bygone-muncie-close-encounter-overlook-some-kind/1328130001/
