Historic Traders Point Indiana

Today I went to a Pike Township Historical Society meeting.   Joe Wagle of New Augusta shared a couple of 3 minute 8mm color movies his Dad made in 1956.   One was of the May 1956 flood at Traders Point.   The movies are in living color.   The stills below are grainy (my apologies) and were shot directly from the tv screen as I paused the dvd (Joe had transferred the movie to DVD so that he could share it with our group and he gave me a copy of the cdr.)   I chose to go with stills because it allowed me to freeze frame the best images of the movies.   But there may be merit in posting the movies and I may do that at a later date.   It’s kind of fun to look at the journey these images have had: first they were filmed in 8 mm.   At the time they would have been sent out for development, returned to the customer on a small reel, placed by the customer on a projector at home, projected onto a wall or screen, and put away for who knows how long (in this case about 55 years).  Joe transferred them to DVD so that he could save them as digital images and record to a computer as digital files.   The CDR he gave me was made on I-Movie.   Then I used my iphone to record these images that were frozen when I paused the movie at the images I wanted to capture.  I then emailed the images to my gmail account, cropped and enhanced the images in  paint.net and posted them to this blog.    

the Conarroe's Traders Point Market was located in northwest corner of Eagle Creek and Lafayette Road

Traders Point covered bridge (1945) over Fishback Creek on West 86th Street

source: George Wilkins and the archives of Pike Township Historical Society

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Bill Kappel retired from operating the Farm Bureau Co-op at the end of 2011.   A fixture in the Traders Point area for several decades, Bill, his wife, and their son Greg, operated the only remaining business in the village of Traders Point.   They will be missed.   The facility, owned by the City of Indianapolis through its Department of Public Works, is now vacant.

http://www.amazon.com/Early-Times-Boone-County-Indiana/dp/0788423010

Several years ago a neighbor gave me this picture of the flooded village.  I believe this dates to a massive flood from the late 1950s.   It was this flood that led to the construction of an earthen levee along the westside of Eagle Creek, and later the development of the Eagle Creek Reservoir.   The photo’s orientation is from the northwest corner of Dandy Trail (which led into the village from the westside of the Eagle Creek Valley) and Lafayette Road.  It is looking to the north with Lafayette Road on the right side of the photo.   The Traders Point Christian Church is the white building to the right of the Standard pylon sign.   Nelson Roetter, a lifelong resident of the area, remembers seeing the pews floating in the sanctuary.   The church later relocated to the top of the Lafayette Road hill at Moore Road and is now the site of the New Life Worship Center.

Ford Bridge construction to begin in 2012.