Drive on Indiana Highway 37, heading south from Bloomington, Indiana (where several Vatican Observatory folks were gathered for the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse) toward Bedford, and you will see the sign above. There is a similar sign on US Highway 50 heading toward Bedford from the east. Perhaps there are other signs elsewhere. Lawrence County, Indiana, is Astronaut County. Astronauts Kenneth D. Bowersox and Charles D. Walker come from Bedford, the county seat. Astronaut Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom is from the town of Mitchell, a few miles south of Bedford on IN-37.
Grissom was the second American in space. He died in the fire on the Apollo 1 mission in 1967. Click here for a post about him and Mitchell.
Walker and Bowersox were of a later generation. Walker graduated from Bedford High School in 1966, Bowersox in 1974. Both became astronauts in the 1980s — Walker via an engineering route, Bowersox via being an aviator in the US Navy.
Lawrence County is not large — its total population is 45,000; the population of Bedford is 14,000. There have been 360 US astronauts. The population of the US is 330 million. In other words, the US produces roughly 1 astronaut for every million people. Thus, we might expect three astronauts from a major metropolitan area, not from a county of 45,000. From a county that size, we would expect zero. Lawrence County really stands out regarding astronauts!
However, astronauts are not the only standout thing about Lawrence County. It also produces stone. That’s sort of a contrast: astronauts, up, the heavens; stone, down, the Earth. A lot of limestone comes out of Lawrence County, and has since the nineteenth century. Lawrence County is home to the Indiana Limestone Company, located in the town of Oolitic (Oolite is a type of rock). That is just north of Bedford, and of course is marked with large stone figures.
Lots of stuff is made of stone in Lawrence County. The support for the “welcome to Lawrence County” sign on IN-37 pictured above is stone, as can be seen in the wider view seen below, at left (although the support for the sign on westbound US-50 isn’t — below, right). In some places, guardrails on roads are made of limestone. This sort of guardrail will likely stand up against even a large truck. It will also likely stand up against the passage of time, to become the Stonehenge of the Indiana of the future!
Of course, what might you expect in a place where they have been cutting stone from the ground for a very long time but a magnificent stone Catholic church! Unfortunately, I could find no space- or astronomy-related art in Bedford’s St. Vincent de Paul Church (erected 1893), and no indication that any of the three Lawrence County astronauts were affiliated with the place. Nevertheless, I am including pictures, because the stone church is cool, and because it seems to combine Earth and heaven. That seems fitting for this unique place that produces people who both delve down into the Earth as cutters of stone and rocket up into the heavens as astronauts.
