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According to conservative assessments from unofficial scorekeepers of the American dining scene, more than 75 percent of all restaurants will close or change hands within five years of opening. You can imagine, then, how few Indiana restaurants are in a position to laugh at that chilling statistic from a distance of three decades or more. Here are a few such places, however -- restaurants that have skillfully blended the twin virtues of hard work and consistent quality and have stood the test of time. They've lasted through queasy economic conditions, fickle American taste buds and ridiculously poor odds. For the record, our survey does not include the venerable Kopper Kettle in Morristown, since we profiled that Grand Duchess of the Indiana dining kingdom in the September 1986 issue of Indiana Business. For the same reason, Cafe Johnell in Fort Wayne is not included.
The Log Inn (1828)
It wasn't until 1963 that the late John Rettig discovered that the restaurant he bought in 1947 in the tiny farming hamlet of Warrenton, 12 miles north of Evansville, is the oldest eatery in Indiana. It was in 1963 that Rettig first discovered his Log Inn was made of logs. His wife Victoria had voiced such suspicions to him, based on the size and structure of the windows, but it wasn't until a couple of weather-beaten poplar boards came loose that Rettig uncovered his establishment's log roots. He immediately commenced further archeological digging and intense historical research through musty court records to discover his place began life in 1825 as a stagecoach stop and trading post. It served the dining needs of travelers waiting to be dispatched to Vincennes, Evansville and Princeton.
Its owner in the mid-1800s, Meier Heiman, expanded the building into, in effect, a major one-stop convenience store, accommodating diners, drinkers, shoppers and traders. In so doing, he covered the logs with the sleeker, trendier look of hand-split hickory laths. Among Heiman's more-spirited customers were the gentlemen working on the Erie Canal seven miles away. They introduced the concept of the barroom brawl to Heiman's frequently. Heiman took their money, but not their guff, steering the combatants into the street.
In the 1890s, the Log Inn was the place for Saturday night square dancing on the...