The name of this collection of blogs and media is entitled “The Indiana Tenderloin Chronicles”, not “The Northern Indiana Tenderloin Chronicles”. With living in one of the top northern counties in the state I can find it hard to get to the other side to visit their town and taste their tenderloin. Since Little League baseball games start next weekend, I took this open weekend to take my son on a little overnight road trip across the capital to a little town called Franklin, named after the founding father and early experimenter of electricity, Benjamin Franklin.
The Tenderloin:
The Willard in Franklin is on almost every top whatever list of tenderloins in Indiana. It’s what brought me down here and is the place chosen for dinner. The Willard was first built as a home in 1860. That’s 5 years before Lincoln was shot, over 160 years ago. As time passed it became a hotel and currently it serves up bar food to the residents of the town. The spiral staircase is so cool to see when you walk in. It looks like you are going to someone’s house, but then you turn in the other room and find dining tables on the side and a wraparound bar right in the middle of the establishment. We took a table in the corner patio where there were only two high-top tables and a large glass window where you could gaze out to the street and watch the people pass by in the neighborhood. It was just an awesome, relaxed place with a nice vibe, and yet you almost feel like you are sitting in your grandma’s house just waiting for the dinner to come out. And when the food did come, the tenderloin shined in its golden breaded shell. It was 1-1/2 times bigger than the bun in length and thickness. The juicy white meat inside was so tender you didn’t have to bite hard into it, it almost fell off in your mouth after cracking past the thin crisp breading. And, since they have bar food - they have wings, since they have wings – they have hot wing sauce, and hot just hot wing sauce, but X-hot wing sauce. It added that extra punch to make this worthy of any Indiana top whatever tenderloin list. With all the historical value of the building, The Willard is a site to see and a final destination on any trail.
The Town:
Downtown Franklin is only 12 miles away from the biggest city in Indiana, but it maintains an incredible small town feel. The first county seat south of the capitol is surrounded by farms. This doesn’t seem to be possible after driving through the Indy-Carmel-Westfield megalopolis on the north side to get here. But there is an local art craft fair going on around the courthouse and I was able to parallel park right on Jefferson St… in the middle of a Saturday… FOR FREE!
The Hoosier Cupboard and Candy & Ice Cream sits in an old railroad depot facing the tracks. Inside you can find all kinds of sugary treats including truffles, saltwater taffy, ice cream, and a large selection of unique soft drinks. My son picked up a Yoo-hoo and I got my favorite drink in the whole world (outside of alcoholic beverages), a bottle of Green River. Granted, the lime flavored pop tastes best when mixed at your local soda shop, but second best when in a bottle. We also got a collection of truffles for my wife including of all her favorite flavors and one dark chocolate rum one for me. The museum portion of the depot is closed on the weekends, but they were kind enough to open it up for us and give us a tour. Inside are numerous artifacts from the era before internet postal delivery service. Back in the day, you would order your products through mail, telegraph, large bullhorn, or however they did it back before entering your credit card number in your phone and hitting “purchase now”. You would then drive over and check into the depot window where items arrived by train and stored in order to pick up your new items. You can find all kinds of cool stuff in there, now, from signs, signals, schedules, menus, maps, and just about everything you wanted to see related to the railroad industry up close.
Tucked inside one of the century old buildings along the main strip is a shop called Gamers Cave. Inside is all your favorite board games you didn’t know existed as well as our favorite collectible card games such as Magic and Pokémon. It also houses 3 stories of gaming tables to host everything from experienced Dungeons and Dragons sessions to training classes to teach kids and adults to play Pokémon. They can help you find games that may peak your interest and the levels are rentable for you to host your own private parties and game nights.
The Toodleydoo Toy Store sits in a prominent space right off courthouse square. You can find all kinds of different items for boys and girls. My ten-year-old was a bit too old for most of the items in there, but even he managed to get a special type of Rubik’s Cube and a sports book. It is a perfect place to shop for a gift in order to avoid the large crowds and make your way to the toy section at the bigger box stores.
I tend to do a lot of research before coming to these new towns, but I always like to take a walk to maybe discover someplace I didn’t see or somewhere I didn’t know I wanted to go. Right behind the courthouse lies 10 Pins. At first it looks like just your normal bowling alley, but when you peer inside you see eight lanes of mini-bowling. Mini-bowling is similar to duckpin bowling. You use the rules of regular bowling, but use smaller hole-less balls and the pins are on strings. The alley is a little shorter than duckpin and you don’t get the third throw each frame. We were able to walk up and rent a lane for an hour and got in three and a half games each. There is a bar on the side where you could order soft or hard drinks. We both had a blast at this place and what made it sweeter was we didn’t even plan on it.
One of the places I did plan on seeing in Franklin was a movie at the Artcraft Theater. Closed since COVID, I was able to secure tickets to the re-opening weekend show where they were showing the movie “Major League”. What better movie to celebrate the start of Little League than to see a rag-tag bunch of players get together to beat the Yankees. The Artcraft is your typical one stage theater that cities built on their main streets to watch plays and movies. Usually you can get a story out of your grandparents on how they would spend a nickel and watch cartoons and old westerns all day on Saturdays back when they were kids. In the 80’s these places started closing up and some even torn down with the new multi-screen cineplexes being constructed on the outskirts of town. The new century has seen the revitalization of downtown areas and one of the centerpieces bringing back the people is the renovation of the old theater. Walking in you see the old popcorn station and ticket booths. Neon lights cover the ceiling lighting the way to the stairway to the top of the seating area. The screen sits on an actual stage which people can walk and address the crowd as they this before this day’s feature. It was charming to see an MC come up and talk about the feature and the local sponsors for the event. They raffled off a couple door prices and talked a little about the theater and how they can’t wait to finish renovations and open to full capacity again. It started with a Bugs Bunny Cartoon. I know from stories that back in the day a cartoon was shown before the movie, but the local drive-in theater where I grew up watching movies used to show a cartoon too. I forgot how much I enjoyed it, and really brought back some nostalgic memories. It put me in a great mood to watch what is probably the best baseball movie of all time (I don’t care much for the “if you build it, he will come” daddy issue, ghost story stuff). That part where Charlie Sheen as Ricky Vaughn come out of the bullpen to a packed stadium singing “Wild Thing” has got to be one of the best scenes of all time. Both my son and I were blown away by the experience. It’s great to have a place for the community to get together, relax, and enjoy a movie.
Mini-bowling was the surprise athletic event of the visit, but we still got in some frisbee golfing down at the Blue Heron Disk Golf Couse on the southwest part of town the next morning. This is a fairly new 25 hole course that starts in open fields, winds next to a lake, and takes you into the woods and back out to your car. It was a beautiful Sunday morning to go out there as opposed to the rain we had the Saturday while exploring. Make sure to bring a change in footwear after the rain, but a beautiful park it was to throw the disks.
We really enjoyed out time in Franklin. Great small town vibe so near to the big city. There are a lot of downtown revitalizations going on in Indiana, they should model themselves after Franklin. There would be more great places to live and visit.
Nothing better than coming back to the hotel room with this waiting for you
Pretty good picture my son took of me while drinking a beer at The Willard
by Michael Tomko
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