Can one still tell Goodrich Prairie from the surrounding vegetation types? Maybe.

My first blog post about Goodrich Prairie showed some relatively open land. The above scene was taken at about point A on the map below, just to the west of the old prairie boundary. (There are a lot of Amish people living further west in the next township, on Nottawa Prairie.)

The prairies are shown in a goldenrod color. The larger brownish/tan areas were savanna at settlement time.

BTW, Lorancie Schellhous, who bought the land at the northeast part of the prairie didn’t call it Goodrich Prairie. He referred to it as Little Prairie.

This photo was taken looking east-northeast. There is a brick house just inside the treeline in the distance. That treeline appears to be about where the east edge of the prairie was. So on this edge of the prairie, it seems that there still is a definite difference in vegetation, 180 years after the government surveyors went through, marking the section corners and making the notes on trees and soils that formed the basis for above map. (The map is mine, made from shapefiles available from the Michigan Natural Features Inventory and from Tiger Census data.)

This is an example of the things I’m looking for when I talk about getting out on my bike to learn about the countryside. The vegetation now is very different from the vegetation cover of 1820. In fact, the vegetation of 1840 was very different from that of 1820. But we can still see traces of the features that made important differences to the first land buyers, even on ground that doesn’t vary much in elevation.