If you’ve driven past the Bean Blossom Overlook on State Road 135 North recently, you may have noticed a few changes: An actual view, with more cars and motorcycles stopping to take it all in.
In February, trees were cut to restore the site to the way it was more than 80 years ago — more overlook than forest. Visitors and residents alike have noticed, stopping to take photos, paint or enjoy a picnic.
The overlook was first established in the early 1930s when State Road 135 North was built. At that time, there were no trees to block the view from the first shelterhouse, which was just below the current shelterhouse.
Brown County commissioner and County Historian Diana Biddle has a photo of her father, Jack McDonald, standing at the site of that overlook, taken around 1936. “There wasn’t a tree on that hill anywhere,” she said.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Resident Keith Bradway, who is in his early 90s, remembers a similar view when he would stop on his way to visit his mother in Fruitdale.
But soon, enough trees began to grow that the view began to shrink.
Around 2010, Bradway wrote an essay about the overlook after reading a letter to the editor in the Brown County Democrat. He asked for trees to be pruned to make the view “once again worth stopping for.”
He took it a step further in 2011, when he approached Brown County Parks and Recreation Director Mark Shields about removing some of the trees. But no action was taken then, because it would have cost parks and rec too much, Shields said.
In 1932, the State Road 135 corridor between Nashville and Bean Blossom had been set aside to “preserve its scenic beauty” by Col Richard Lieber, the director of state parks at the time, Shields explained.
The overlook and about 150 acres of surrounding land were gifted to the parks and rec department in 1985 from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, to “ensure the property remain in local stewardship,” Shields said.
Who was responsible for doing what at the site isn’t clear. Biddle said she’d been looking for documentation of an agreement between the state and the county for four years and hadn’t found anything.
In early 2017, Bradway took up the cause to get the view back, with help from the Peaceful Valley Heritage preservation society. Member Jim Schultz contacted Shields again, Shields went to his board, and they agreed it was a good idea to try and restore the view. The parks and rec board offered to cover the cost.
Shields received permission from the Indiana Department of Transportation to “reopen” the overlook.
“We had to, basically, do a clear cut,” he said last week. Some of the fallen trees were left as animal habitat, Schultz said.
Shields approached a local timber buyer about doing the cut, and he agreed to remove the standing timber that was obstructing the view in exchange for the logs. “We ended up getting a tiny amount of money out of it, but the biggest was we didn’t have to pay anything to have it cut,” Shields said.
Schultz said one of the measures of success that Peaceful Valley Heritage uses for a project is how well it is used. “Almost single time I drive by there, there is at least one car. I think the record was four cars and a motorcycle. It’s being used heavily. The stuff that I’ve heard from community members is that they love it,” he said.
“I am sure there are people against, because that seems to be what some people like to do, but for the most part, it’s been very, very positive from the feedback that Peaceful Valley has received.”
Biddle said she hopes parks and rec considers cutting more across the top of the ridge to the other nearby overlook, “because you could see all the valleys and the grocery store from the other overlook too, not just the big one.” Local folklore held that you could even see all the way to Indianapolis on a clear night.
“I drove by last week and there were so many cars parked in the overlook I couldn’t have pulled in if I wanted to. It was full. People were all out looking at the view,” Biddle said. “By far and away I have heard more compliments.”
“They had kind of forgotten what it looked like,” Shields added.
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When State Road 135 was built in the 1930s, the Indiana Department of Transportation also built roadside tables. Those would eventually be known as scenic overlooks.
Roadside tables had grills and picnic tables. “They were places where people would stop and get their picnic lunch out of their car and eat, because you couldn’t just go through the drive-thru at McDonald’s,” said Brown County commissioner and County Historian Diana Biddle.
With the new view, Biddle said she was thinking of ways to restore it to the way she remembers it from her childhood, when her father would load up supplies from his Bean Blossom grocery and fix breakfast at the overlook for his neighbors and employees. “Then, Jacob showed up and answered my prayers,” she said.
Boy Scout Jacob Wooton is planning to restore some of those features at the Bean Blossom overlook for his Eagle Scout project. He’ll bring in new picnic tables and add some grills, and Scouts from Troop 190 will help paint over graffiti at the shelterhouse as a service project, he said.
“You can come and sit, but you have to bring your own grill and you have to do all of this. It would really be a service to help tourism and for the community,” he told the commissioners in May.
Wooton is looking for donations for picnic tables, and he plans to raise money to help cover other costs. Biddle said she was going ask him to also repaint the overlook sign in the traditional brown and yellow, like the Brown County State Park signs.
The shelterhouse may also have to be re-roofed, and the county would hire someone to do that, she added. “We’ll probably include a couple hundred dollars in our capital improvement budget to finish that.”
Since Wooton’s project is on county property, Biddle said the commissioners would give him around $500 toward his materials. “We’ll let him do what he wants to do, then we’ll fill in the blanks then make a whole project out of it,” she said.
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