FREETOWN – The origin of the Freetown gym — how it came to be, how it was utilized and how it remains a center of this quiet community of 370 people in Jackson County — is a story of small town Indiana and the state’s growing love affair with high school basketball.

The year was 1930. For several years previously, the Freetown basketball teams practiced on a dirt court in the schoolyard or in a small gym that had been converted for basketball by Sherman Berry, a local businessman. Berry, the owner of flouring mill in Waymansville, hired Freetown carpenters Bill Cornett and James Huber as engineers to construct the new gymnasium, built from the materials of the old Tobrocke flour mill.

In 1930 and ’31, during the height of the Great Depression, Freetown children watched their fathers haul

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