I like to stop in Centreville, the county seat of St. Joseph County, Michigan. It’s usually a good place for a lunch break, and it’s the right distance from home for one. In 2006 there was a sandwich shop on Main Street that I stopped at a few times. When I’m completely self-contained, I can make myself a cup of coffee at a picnic bench on the courthouse lawn, as I did on this ride in summer 2001.

I hope the sandwich shop is still there. I didn’t make so much as one ride to Centreville this year. The one time I rode to White Pigeon, I had enough time for the luxury of a more circuitous route.

This courthouse is kitty-corner across the street from the building used for court back in the 1830s, where the lawsuit against Patrick Marantette ended up with a judgment against him in 1836. I already blogged about it here.

A couple of days ago, while looking for something on another topic in reel 41 of the records of the “Michigan Superintendency of Indian Affairs and Mackinac Agency, Letters Received,” I stumbled upon another tidbit of information about this incident. It’s a letter from Stevens T. Mason, the territorial governor of Michigan, to Henry Schoolcraft, the Indian Agent, dated December 26, 1836. Schoolcraft had apparently asked him about the Marantette case, and Mason wrote back explaining what it had been about. The new piece of information is that the government defended the suit against Marantette. I had known from reading the journal of the court that Andrew Backus had been an attorney for Marantette, but I had assumed that Marantette stood the cost himself. It turns out this is not so. In this letter Mason informs Schoolcraft that the government hired Backus to defend him, and that Backus was paid $300 for his work. That’s nearly three times of the damages and court costs assessed against Marantette. Nothing new about the ratio of lawyer fees to jury awards, I suppose.