The Story Inn

The Hotel

The Story Inn is the entire village of Story, Indiana, a hamlet founded in 1851 in the hills of Brown County and reinvented in the 1980s as a working bed and breakfast. The property occupies the original general store, the schoolhouse, the blacksmith's shop, and ten of the village's earliest residential cottages, with the remaining structures repurposed as a barn-format wedding venue and a herb garden. The whole village sits on a single 1,000-foot stretch of State Road 135, surrounded by the forests of Brown County State Park and the Hoosier National Forest, roughly 90 minutes south of Indianapolis and 20 minutes south of Nashville (the Indiana town, not the Tennessee city). The property's house motto, repeated on every menu and sign, is "One inconvenient location since 1851."

Accommodation runs roughly 14 to 15 keys depending on the season and which cottages are in operation, with rooms in the main inn (the upper floor of the original general store) and standalone cottages converted from the village's earliest residences. Each cottage is named for the building's original occupant or function (the Carriage House, the Blue Lady Cottage, the Wheelwright's Cottage), and each is restored to maintain the original character (exposed beams, plank floors, fieldstone fireplaces) while introducing private bathrooms, jetted tubs in select categories, comfortable king and queen beds, and contemporary heating and cooling. The Blue Lady Cottage is the property's most-booked unit, partly for the room, partly because the inn has a long-running ghost story tied to a former resident named the Blue Lady, who guests routinely report seeing on the second-floor landing of the main inn.

The restaurant is the property's anchor and the principal reason for the room rates. The Story Inn Restaurant occupies the 1851 general store and serves a daily-changing prix fixe menu of refined Hoosier cuisine: country ham, persimmon and pecan dishes in autumn, locally caught trout and morel mushrooms in spring, and a sugar cream pie that has been the dessert for forty years. The kitchen runs locally sourced for nearly the entire plate, the dining room books out three to four weeks in advance for Friday and Saturday, and the multi-course tasting nights are the property's signature events. Below the dining room, the Story Still tavern occupies the basement that once served as a Prohibition-era gin distillery; the bar runs a serious bourbon program and a long wine list, and it is the village's only late-night option.

The Story Inn also functions as one of Brown County's most-booked wedding venues. The barn behind the herb garden has been converted into a 120-seat reception space, the village green is the standard ceremony location, and the entire inn is routinely booked out as a single property for weekend weddings. For non-wedding guests, the surrounding county provides the daytime program: Brown County State Park (16,000 acres of hardwood forest with the best fall colour in the Midwest), the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, the artist colony of Nashville with its galleries and craft shops, and the Hoosier National Forest trails. The Story Inn sells overnight dining packages that bundle the room with the restaurant prix fixe and a continental breakfast at a meaningful discount.

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