Wooden floors that creak, candy jars lined up like soldiers, and screen doors that slap shut behind every visitor: Indiana still keeps places like this alive.
Scattered across farm country, river bluffs, and forested hollows, a handful of general stores have kept their doors open since the 1800s, quietly outlasting floods, fires, and highways that rerouted traffic somewhere else.
Some sell groceries and deli sandwiches, others sell rock candy and antique tin signs, and a few do all of it at once. Together they form a loose route through small towns that rarely appear on postcards but reward anyone willing to take the long way around…