This is the seventh of a 10-part series featuring some of Indiana high school basketball‘s “Lost Gyms.”

ECONOMY, Ind. – Steve Luellen was a little boy in 1951, just starting out in school as a kindergartner. He was also the mascot for his older brother Ron’s basketball team — the Economy Cardinals. Steve would go out on the court during breaks in the action and hold up a sign with the players’ names.

Steve vividly remembers looking up to the “Peanut Heaven”, where local men climb the ladder along the wall and watch the basketball games from a wooden plank above the court. Their boots would drip from walking through the snow outside on to the people sitting below.

“When I walk in here, I think about ‘Peanut Heaven,’” said Gary Saunders, a 1957 Economy graduate. “It was packed with people sitting on the walkway up there. Of course they didn’t want kids up there, but we got up there anyway. It was a good place to watch a game.”

The Economy gym is a time capsule to the earliest days of high school basketball. The wood-beam structure was erected in 1922 as a community hall for all public gatherings, except church and Sunday school. At that time, the tiny community in Wayne County had two grocery stores, two hardware stores, a drug store, a restaurant, a garage and a blacksmith shop.

And, of course, a basketball team.

The community hall, a white barn with four class windows that looks much like it did 102 years ago, allowed the basketball team to move out of the makeshift hall at the church, where the team had played in previous years. The playing floor was just 61 feet long with a wall on the east end of the court serving as the out-of-bounds “line.” There is a stage on the west end, where concessions were sold during games and used for school plays.

“It was quite a place to play because as you can see, we didn’t have much room to hit the boards,” said 91-year-old Ron Luallen, a 1951 graduate. “Back then, you didn’t have big scores. If you hit 50, you had a good night. As you can see, (the gym) is not that wide. So, if you had a good zone defense, you could cover ground. That used to be an issue. When we had to go to sectional tournaments and play like in Richmond, you had to get used to that extra width and length, especially when you played a zone defense.”

Economy, despite its small size, typically punched above its weight. Jimmy Oler, as a senior, led the Cardinals to the 1952 Wayne County championship. Oler, who scored 1,260 points at Economy to set a school record, went on to set the scoring record at Florida State (1,817 points) that stood for 39 years and was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023. Bill Townsend was Economy’s coach from 1951 to ’55.

“I set a lot of (screens) for him to drive,” Ron Luellen said. “It’s not easy to drive in a small gym. You hit that wall hard.”

Economy played its high school games here until 1958, when they moved their home games to nearly Williamsburg and its larger gym. An independent team made up of local players called the Economy Royals also called the gym home from 1947-55.

The school, with just seven seniors in its final graduating class, was consolidated into Hagerstown in 1962. The brick school building, built in 1907 and located just west of the gym, housed the elementary school until 1971 and was torn down two years later.

The gym stayed. Saunders was the township trustee in 1971, a role he kept for 32 years for Perry Township.

“In ’71, a school board member came to me and asked if we’d like to have the property back from the school corporation,” Saunders said. “Some community members got together, and we passed a petition to every household in the township. Every household except one voted to get the property back.”

Saunders helped to form a community council with each church, the 4-H, Lions Club and Conservation Club, each having a member, along with the township advisory board. For one of their first gym fundraisers, they put on an alumni game between Economy and Milton that raised enough money to replace the roof. They later boxed in the windows below the gym, where the cafeteria and locker rooms were once located, and replaced the four windows to the gym in the same style of the 1920s.

The Economy gym has served its original purpose as a community center almost 70 years after the last high school game was played there. People can rent it out — and often do — for $15 an hour for a minimum of two hours. There is a Halloween carnival every year, the Lions Club uses it for various events, and it still plays an important role in the community.

Saunders who made a deal with coach Rex McCoy to be the basketball team student manager as a senior in 1957-58 in exchange for a letter jacket, is nearly brought to tears when he talks about what the building means to the town.

“When the schools left the small communities, the small communities almost died,” Saunders said. “I’ve closed my business down (farm machinery repair) and we’ve got a machine shop and truck repair shop just over the hill. That’s the only business left. Back when I was in school, we had like three grocery stores, two filling stations, a garage. It just died basically.”

But the gym lives. And it has new life, too, thanks to a mural painted by Carl Leck of Greenfield in the summer of 2024. It was one of nine murals painted during the Wayne County murals projects, which was part of the Hoosier Enduring Legacy Program, funded through the Wayne County Foundation and Wayne County Convention and Tourism Bureau.

The mural includes a Cardinal perched a top a basketball, a red-and-white Economy pennant, the 1952 Wayne County championship trophy, a “E” from a letter jacket, two ticket stubs and a cursive “Royals” on the basketball in honor of the independent team.

The old-timers in “Peanut Heaven” would be thrilled.

“The community,” Saunders said, “has a lot of pride in this building.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 270-4904. Get IndyStar’s high school coverage sent directly to your inbox with the High School Sports newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: ‘Peanut Heaven’ was a unique feature of gym built in 1922 in Economy