Granville

Thanks to Roger Kramer’s blog, I learned of another one that’s very new, but looks like it has potential: Dan on Bike. Dan lives, rides, and takes photos in one of my favorite areas for riding, Tippecanoe County, Indiana. His area is a good place for settlement era history in general, and Black Hawk war scare history in particular.

A few days ago Dan posted a great photo taken from the Granville bridge. I looked through my photos for one of my own, but don’t seem to have any of the bridge. I have some from Granville itself, though. I’ve been there twice. The first time was in January 2002 when I did some weekend riding in order to get in shape for surgery, as I put it at the time. In September 2006 I took the above photo of the historical marker where Granville used to be.

In 2006 it seemed there were more houses in the Granville area than I remembered from 2002, when the area seemed somewhat desolate. And now it looks like it’s going to become a subdivision.

I presume the Granville cemetery will be left undeveloped, though. In 2002 I was able to wander among the gravestones. In September 2006 it was thick with prairie vegetation. The cemetery is being preserved as a prairie remnant.

I somehow have in my head a story told by Sandford C. Cox of how in the late 1820s, when he was a teenager, he lost a leg in a tree-felling accident, then ran away from home (in Montgomery County, to the south) and managed to cross the Wabash River here where Granville later came to be. Cox became a schoolteacher and newspaper man, and wrote a series of articles that in 1860 were published as “Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley.” Tonight I looked through my copy of his book (it has been reprinted in 1970 and again in 2007) but could not find that story. So either my search image is no good, or it was somewhere else that I read it, or I completely imagined it.

The above photo is looking west toward the Wabash River valley. The Granville bridge is to the north, well out of the photo on the right. From Granville I was headed south, but first took some back roads along the edge of the river valley.

I rode about 88 miles that day. It was already mid-afternoon by the time I got to Granville, and there were 65 miles (and one more history stop) yet to go.

The day before I had taken a fall in the rain on a railroad track, near the Tippecanoe battlefield, and cracked a rib, though I didn’t yet realize it on the day of this ride. The first few days it didn’t bother me at all during the day when I was riding, but trying to sleep on it got to be more of a problem each evening until this tour was over.