Imagine a City…

Imagine a city situated on the majestic curve of the second largest river in the United States—a place just over an hour from two national forests where the only coast to coast trail runs right through town, in a county saturated with the largest number of state champion trees—where a 200+ year-old cherry bark oak with a 22-foot circumference stands as a sentinel in the middle of town, just a mile away from the largest tract of urban virgin forest in the nation.

Imagine a city with multiple universities, one of which recently celebrated its 170^th anniversary, founded the very same year as the longest running free public high school west of the Allegheny Mountains, both just a few miles away from where the oldest public library in the state resides.

Imagine a city where one of the earliest professional football games was played, in a stadium that remains as the third oldest active ballpark in the US, where Hall of Famers, major champions, and all-stars once resided, and where on a bluff overlooking the river, the Friday night lights shine ever so brightly in the largest high school football stadium in the state. 

Imagine a city within an hour of where our country’s greatest president entered as a boy and left as a man, just to the southeast of where on February 25^th, 1779, the greatest army in the world surrendered to a small band of militia that set a course for a new nation conceived in liberty, and where over a 160 years later, this river city’s shipyards built more LSTs than any other location in the US, and now is home to the last operational LST still standing just as it was during our world’s greatest war.

Imagine a city shrouded in the arts and leisure, where the Philharmonic Orchestra recently celebrated its 90^th birthday in a 100+ year-old theatre that almost a century ago was one of the first movie palaces in the Midwest, where just up the road the second oldest public golf course in the state, enshrined on one of golf’s greatest trophies, shares its hills next door with an accredited zoo and botanical garden and a park named for its benefactor, where the 2022 Amateur Disc Golf World Championship was held.

Imagine a city known for its eats, where the second largest street festival in the country has been in operation for more than a century, where unique brews, sodas, snacks, and foods of all kind have become their own, where ethnic meets hometown, and hometown meets the season, and pizzas and pies of all kinds can be found.

Imagine a city that really cares, with one of the highest non-for-profit rates per capita in the state, where multiple major hospital systems abound and where a yearly fantasy of lights raises around 200,000 dollars for a local rehabilitation center; a place where the 10^th smallest baby in the world recently graduated high school and where generations of people care for their own.

Now imagine this.  The city we speak of has barely a hundred thousand residents, and it is in Indiana.  It has virtually no traffic and one of the lowest costs of living, with one of the strongest public and parochial educational systems in the state.  It’s a place where a child can go from preschool through medical residency, and never leave the area, where two blocks to the east of the medical school they can gaze out over the great Ohio River, and two blocks in any other direction, pray in sacred spaces to the God that made it all possible.  It’s a city where if you stand in line long enough, you’ll probably get to know the person in front of you, and the person behind you, where southern hospitality merges with northern charm.  This city is Evansville.  Are you surprised?  Maybe it’s time we re-imagine just what has made this city so great, and reconsider where hidden greatness still lies.  Maybe it’s time our River City steps out of the shadow, and into the spotlight, as we pursue a vision for the generations to come.