NashvilleBrown County's hill-country art town — Nashville, the Little Smokies state park, and Hard Truth's distillery valley

Nashville (the Indiana one — set the GPS carefully) is the county seat of Brown County, sixty miles south of Indianapolis at the western edge of the Hoosier National Forest. The town is built around a 1879 brick courthouse and a four-block grid of independent shops, working artist studios, and family-run kitchens. Brown County State Park's north gate (a historic covered bridge with a 9-foot clearance) sits two minutes east of downtown; the park's nearly 16,000 acres include the 90-foot Weed Patch Hill fire tower, the Abe Martin Lodge with an indoor water park, and the Ogle Lake and Strahl Lake hiking loops. October foliage week is the busiest stretch of the calendar.

Our Nashville rentals concentrate in two pockets. The 3rd Floor Penthouse Suites — the boutique penthouse-suite building on South Van Buren Street — put guests one block from the courthouse, the Brown County Playhouse, and Big Woods Pizza, with floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the Brown County Courthouse dome. Cottages and cabins farther out scatter through Story, Helmsburg, Gnaw Bone, and Bean Blossom for the quieter forest stays. Most rentals include free parking, full kitchens, and walking distance to either the courthouse square or a State Park trailhead.