This is the Marantette House in St. Joseph County, Michigan. Just on the other side of the house is the St. Joseph River. It was built just after the Black Hawk war of 1832. At the time of the war scare there was a double log cabin here which served as a trading post for Indians. The land here was part of the Nottawasepe reservation in the 1820s and 1830s. There is a lot of information about Patrick Marantette to put on my Black Hawk Slept Here web, but I don’t think I’ve put a stitch of information about him there yet. Well, one item is that he met Black Hawk in 1825, and did business with him at his trading post. But the 1825 trading post was in what is now the next county, and not at this site.
It was the Amish America blog article, “Men in the schoolhouse”, that made me think of it. I was surprised to learn from Erik Wesner that only 6 percent of the teachers in Amish schools in Holmes County, Ohio, are males. Erik also tells of having been offered a teaching job in an Amish school in Indiana (very rare for an outsider) and of helping out at an Amish school this week.
What does that have to do with the Marantette house? On my first ride to this house, in late February 1997, I met an Amish man in the front yard, trimming the trees. Two young children were with him, not old enough to help much. I kind of guessed it was not his house but I asked, and later we had a chance to talk.
When he learned that I was interested in the interactions between Native Americans and Euro-American settlers at the time of the Black Hawk war, he told me that he wished the children at school could learn more about the Indians who had lived in the area. He had read what was in the 1877 county history, but that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. When he would be cultivating his fields on Nottawa Prairie (top quality farmland which begins just this side of the fence in the photo) he would be close to the ground where he would have a chance to see arrowheads and spearpoints that would get turned up. He’d stop his team and jump off to get them. It made him want to know more about the people who had lived here.
He invited me to come to his children’s school to talk about it. I had just barely started on my Black Hawk project at the time, so begged off. I wasn’t ready to do presentations then yet. But I’ll bet I have his name in one of my notebooks. His own children are probably past that school age by now.
In thinking about it later, after I did start doing presentations on the topic, it occurred to me that it probably wouldn’t work to do it with a slide show or powerpoint projector unless I’d take a monster battery system with me. Maybe a series of posters would be better.
(Erik talks about how they manage to teach in one-room schools. I once thought I knew something about it, because I attended one- and two-room schools, complete with outhouses, for my 1st through 8th grade education. Later (but many years ago) I taught in a two-room school for a couple of years, and came to the conclusion it couldn’t be done just on nostalgia, even though by then we had such conveniences as running water and indoor toilets.)
Very cool story and great photo as usual. I bet they would have loved to have heard whatever you had to offer on Black Hawk.