People who live in Franklin feel that they're far enough from the capital’s busy and heavy traffic but close enough to withstand that annoyance if they want to go somewhere to enjoy a variety of big-city attractions, fine restaurants and night life.
Franklin College is a private liberal arts institution founded in 1834 with a campus spanning more than 200 acres that include athletic fields and a 31-acre biology woodland.
Its enrollment is just above 1,000, and the school offers bachelor’s degrees in more than 50 majors in 24 academic disciplines. It also offers 11 pre-professional programs and boasts a student-to-faculty ratio of 11:1 and average class sizes of 15.
The school's athletics teams belong to the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference. The college offers its students 21 interscholastic sports, and its website claims that 43 percent of the student enrollment participates in at least one of those sports.
One sport in particular – football – has helped raise the school’s profile in the past two decades. Franklin football teams, under the leadership of head coach Mike Leonard for 17 of those years, won or shared 11 HCAC championships and earned a berth in the NCAA Division III postseason tournaments nine times, reaching the quarterfinals in 2008, its best tournament performance. The Grizzlies play their home games at Stewart "Red" Faught Stadium, a few blocks west of the new athletics facilities mentioned in the previous paragraph.
The campus is just a few blocks east of the heart of downtown Franklin, two blocks south of Jefferson Street (also Indiana Highway 144), the main east-west thoroughfare downtown. It’s also a short jaunt from Province Park, the city’s largest municipal park.
What impressed me about the Franklin College campus during my visits there was the long, rectangular Dame Mall, on which students and visitors can access many of the school's key buildings. Among these are Old Main, Johnson Center for Fine Arts, Shirk Hall, Hoover and Cline halls, Hamilton Library, Napolitan Student Center, Barnes Science Hall and Lacy Labs, Richardson Memorial Chapel and Johnson-Dietz Residence Hall. Plus, Dietz Center and Elsey Hall are just across Forsythe Street on the mall's east end.
Forsythe is one of two mains accesses to campus from the north. The other is Branigin Boulevard, where, on the northwest corner of campus at Monroe Street, stands one of two well-known campus likenesses of Benjamin Franklin, the college's namesake. This likeness is a limestone sculpture of Franklin standing to greet visitors.
Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on your perspective), students have surreptitiously painted and/or painted over the statue multiple times over its 60 years of existence. It never received a proper repair until 2014, when the school finally decided to hire a concrete contractor to strip the paint and restore it and the marble base to its original splendor. The statue was all white -- and yet to be repaired -- when I made two visits to the campus (see pictures immediately below) in 2009 and a third in 2012.
The other Franklin likeness is a bronze sculpture seated on a bench in Dame Mall. This Franklin likeness is a popular prop seated next to visitors in photographs. You’ll find a photo of it farther down in this chapter.
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