Wynnedale, IN

Wynnedale is a small town tucked five miles northwest of downtown Indianapolis, where an old suburban-rural edge still survives inside the city's Unigov structure. It became an included town in 1970, joining Indianapolis while retaining a functioning town government under Indiana law. That arrangement gives Wynnedale a distinctive civic identity: residents are part of a major city and a separate town at the same time, with their own council, streets, and local boundaries.

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The landscape reaches back further than the legal arrangement. Farms once occupied the area around the bluffs, and the Swift Family Cemetery dates to about 1840. Road access changed as bridges opened across the White River—first the 30th Street Bridge in 1907, then the 38th Street Bridge in 1962—and the old farm roads gradually became part of the northwestern Indianapolis street pattern. Today Wynnedale's schools fall within Washington Township, including Crooked Creek Elementary, Westlane Middle, and North Central High. Wynnedale is a pocket-sized Indiana town with a farm-country past, a city address, and a government that managed to stay its own.