All morning and part of the afternoon were spent in the library in Bluffton. I was able to find the death date and gravestone location for Allen Norcross in records compiled by the local genealogy people. I had been at the right cemetery, but had somehow missed it. And armed with the death date, I went looking in the 1879 newspaper archives for more information about his death. I was just about to give up when I decided to scan one more issue, and there found it mentioned in a gossipy section about local events. And I learned who had been the executor of his estate.

I’ve always wanted to do more bicycling vacations like this — days of riding interspersed with substantial amount of time in local libraries, looking for more local history. This one worked out as well as I imagined it could.

So we drove out to the Murray cemetery for another visit. Norcross was said to be somewhat reclusive (though affable enough) in his final years, with his wife long dead and his kids gone to Texas. So it is fitting that his gravestone is way off to the edge of the cemetery, barely visible in the shadows in the above photo. On it are the words “Rest Father,” which suggests that his kids did come back from Texas after his death to claim their substantial inheritance. And this also explains how the local history write could have known that they were in poor circumstances down there.

I’ll be putting more about Allen Norcross here: Allen Norcross “pulled up stakes”.

Then it was time for a bike ride. The ride to Decatur was one from the Wabash River to the St. Mary’s River, across flat country that had once been so wet that people said it was easier and faster to travel the 125 miles to Cincinnati than the 25 miles to Fort Wayne. People still work at it to keep it drained, which is what the equipment in the above photo is for.

In Decatur I got a bit lost, and wasn’t even sure which side of the St. Mary’s River I was on. I didn’t want a long ride today, because I wanted an early start for a long ride tomorrow. But eventually I realized I was still on the south side of the St. Mary’s, and had a pleasant ride straight south, much of it through Amish country.

It looks like the Amish household pictured above contains somebody whose whims about birdhouses have been indulged. It’s not often that you see visible signs of individual idiosyncrasies among these people. I hope it isn’t viewed as something harmful. One of their guidelines from the Bible is “Be not conformed to the world,” which is admirable. But as with the 60s hippies and many other non-conformists, this non-conformity is accompanied by considerable conformity within the community.

Some things about Amish country life remind my wife and I of our childhoods. More, though, is of what we heard our parents’ generation tell about farm life (and our parents’ generation was older than that of most people our age). But this photo, directly across the road from the birdhouses, shows an aspect of farm life that has probably not been seen outside Amish country for even longer than that. It was the first time I had seen wheat shocks like this outside of a storybook.

Altogether, today’s ride was 36 miles. It was also one of those rare times when I pulled into the campground sooner than I had predicted.