Reports, news, and stories on quirky roadside attractions! Not all tips verified -- call ahead! Submit your own tip.
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The watchtower is almost hidden by trees and is easy to overshoot; you'll have to turn down the crossroad of the intersection and it's sort of tucked in beside a house. There's a small dead-end driveway you can pull into for photos. The tower itself is very rickety with only fragments of ladder near the top. I wouldn't recommend trying to climb it. The historical marker reads the same on both sides, even though one side faces the wood panel fence and can't really be seen.
[Kitsa, 06/13/2017]Russian Bomber Watchtower and Monument:- Address:
- W. 850 N., West Lafayette, IN
- Directions:
- Hwy 43 west to 900 N., about three miles south of Hwy 18 and six miles north of I-65. Follow to 100 W., cross over I-65, go about a half-mile. Turn left onto W. 850 N.; Tower and monument will be on the right.
- RA Rates:
- Worth a Detour
At N 100 W and W 850 N in Cairo, IN. The tower is weathered and looks like it will fall over any moment.
[Mallory Billings, 07/05/2016]Operation Skywatch lookout tower and monument. Picking my daughter up from Purdue West Lafayette, I planned a mini-off-beat road trip home. We had some difficulty locating Cairo Indiana using a GPS unit, Mapquest, and directions from this site. Prior to heading out I created my own directions the old school way: a hand-held paper map. My daughter (16) found the whole thing lamely amusing. Stories of her grandfather's fear of the Russian's struck a nerve of truth to family tall tales and fears that become instilled in every generation of potential attacks.
Through research I discovered this isn't the actual tower, but a reconstructed one built in 1976. Sadly the wood has rotted and the tower is an unsafe structure not offering much in way of what the original must have looked like. Nonetheless, a fairly well maintained area as the grass is mowed and area clear of any debris. Worth a trip off paved roads as a part of history you didn't and won't learn in school.
[Sandra Nantais, 07/06/2008]If life takes you to West Lafayette, Indiana (home of Purdue), drive north to the nearly abandoned town of Cairo (Kay-roe). There's a big limestone monument and, when I was last there (several years ago) an old wooden watchtower. It was the site of some strange nationwide watch-for-Russians-in-bombers program in the '50s. Volunteers actually staffed the tower on a round-the-clock basis, at least for a while (no picnic in a windy winter in the flat lands of northern Indiana). The statue is of a man, woman and child, watching the skies. There's an inscription, "They also serve who stand and watch."
[Scott Gilbert, 09/01/1997]