May 16
In 1924, downtown Greenfield motorists noticed street commissioners had painted new parking lines overnight along Main Street between Pennsylvania and Spring streets. The new lines were for “flat-to-curb” parking. While parallel parking reduced capacity, it was also hoped to relieve the congestion caused by narrowing the street with angled parking.
May 17
In 1918, Teddy C. Brewer, 20, died in World War I from wounds suffered the day before while defending the front-line trenches in Germany. The Greenfield resident, once a Daily Reporter carrier, served in the U.S. Army.
May 18
In 1999, moviegoers began lining up in the afternoon outside the Legacy 6 cinema on West Main Street in Greenfield, anticipating the showing of “Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.” By 10 p.m. more than 100 patrons were in line.
May 19
In 1919, Hancock County Council was taken to task for not yet using $400 it appropriated to prepare the courthouse so that its restrooms could be open to the public on Sundays, even as the rest of the building was closed. According to this day’s edition of the Daily Reporter, “People traveling through Greenfield in automobiles are apt to have a distasteful memory of the town for this lack of accommodation.”
May 20
In 1935, the sale of household goods drew buyers to the Riley Home, as Julia Riley — sister-in-law of poet James Whitcomb Riley — prepared to move to California to live with a niece. A group of residents was gathering funds to buy the home, “so that it can be cared for and maintained in the future, and this association would also have liked to have kept the furnishings intact but did not have sufficient money at hand to time to do so,” according to that day’s edition of the Daily Reporter.
May 21
In 1964, the Cumberland Heights subdivision received tentative approval from the Hancock County Plan Commission in a preliminary hearing. The May 22, 1965, edition called the 174-lot development “the first major residential subdivision to jump the Marion-Hancock county line on the march toward Greenfield.” About 35 area residents came to the meeting to either protest the project or receive more information about it.
May 22
In 1871, the town of New Palestine was incorporated.
In 1923, an estimated 20,000 people gathered in downtown Greenfield for a Ku Klux Klan rally, surprising city police, who had anticipated a crowd of 7,000 to 8,000 but said the crowd was for the most part orderly. According to the May 23, 1923, edition of the Daily Reporter, “Every community in the county was represented, and Anderson, Muncie, New Castle, Knightstown, Richmond, Connersville, Shelbyville, Rushville and Indianapolis, as well as many smaller places, had people here. … A number of (vehicles) bearing Ohio licenses were parked over town.” Other, smaller rallies took place in the decades to come; in 1974, a reporter writing about an upcoming visit by some Klansmen began his story with “Mark your calendars, Hancock County racists.”
In 1924, Greenfield City Council issued $10,000 in bonds to buy 40.54 acres that would become Riley Park.
