Orange County: French Lick’s Summer Doesn’t End. It Just Changes Shifts.

Labor Day weekend in Orange County is not a farewell. It is a shift change.

The resorts, the casino floor, the railroad, and the golf calendar do not punch out on September 1. French Lick already sells tens of thousands of Polar Express seats every winter. Meetings and events keep the hotels full when the pool crowd goes home. Gaming tax money has paid for park and square work in Paoli and Orleans that those towns would not have funded on property tax alone.

America 250 was the summer theme. The quieter story is the same one that has been true for twenty years: this county bet on visitors when the old economy thinned out, and the bet is still carrying Paoli, West Baden, Orleans, and the Springs Valley schools.

If you live here, Labor Day is traffic on 56 and 145. If you work here, it is the difference between a seasonal job and a year-round one. The visitors will keep coming. The question is whether the towns off the resort campus see enough of the take.