About the Author

John McDonald is the author of Lost Indiana.  He lives in Indiana and often travels the state for his job with a cloud computing company. He is a member of the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana.

He’s authored two other books of similar topic.

John took the photographs on the with an Olympus, then a Sony, and finally a Canon digital camera, edited them using Adobe Photoshop, and designed the site using WordPress.  He published the original Lost Indiana layout and site dating to 2001 with NetObjects Fusion, later ported to Apple iWeb.

The images and layout of this site are property of the author unless otherwise noted.  Obtain permission before reuse.

You can reach him by sending an e-mail to jpmcdon [at] mac.com .



  1. I see you’re writing about Thunder Island. A funny story is that my husband and I both have scars on our knuckles from holding on to the mats and our knuckles getting rubbed off by the seams of the water slides. It was so much fun though. I have many happy memories of that place. The slides were named after sea animals…I think one of them was named the shark or great white. It was the blue slide. I think there was a red and yellow slide as well. Maybe the red was the crab slide? They had a driving range, miniature golf, a lazy river and inner tube bumper boats.

  2. A few places:
    1) Buds restaurant in Fountain square
    2) Thunder Island Shadeland and 21st
    3) Miramar Swim Club – Washington Steet and Post Road
    4) Al Greens drive in restaurant Washington Steet and Shortridge

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OJ Simpson. Shoes. Mark Spitz. Bridge Tournaments. North Webster. What do these things have in common? Why the amazing, curious, and somewhat disturbing history of the fabulous International Palace of Sports.

In Grave Condition

Crown Hill in Indianapolis is the third largest public cemetery in the United States. Opened June 1, 1864 for a young mother named Lucy Seaton who died of “consumption”, it is now the permanent home of over 185,000 people. Let’s take a whistling walk through the catalog of Lost Indiana people there and in other cemeteries throughout the state.

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