Hillsboro, IN

Hillsboro is a Fountain County town of 508 people at the 2020 census, in Cain Township at the intersection of U.S. 136 and State Road 341. Interstate 74 is about a mile north, placing this small town on a clear set of east-west and north-south connections. The name came from the terrain, while the post office began in 1829 under the spelling Hillsborough.

ATTRAlways Shooting / CC BY 2.0

Hillsboro's oldest church was Methodist. The congregation formed in 1870 with 32 members, and its first building measured 30 by 36 feet and cost $1,600. That detail gives the town a physical scale that the highway map alone misses: a small church society, an early mail route, and a crossroads later joined to Interstate 74. Hillsboro's story is compact, with its name, post office, church, and roads each pointing to a different layer of Fountain County history. The roads and congregation sit beside one another in the town's record, making the old crossroads feel unusually easy to trace.