This is the last photo I took on yesterday’s ride. It’s about 20 miles from home, just south of Charleton Park in Barry County, on Section 1 of Baltimore Township. Charleston Park Road is mostly an arrow-straight road that follows the section lines, but here it makes a gentle curve around the pond below this barn. The scene is an old favorite of mine.
Just for fun, I looked in the GLO land patent database to see who the original purchaser was, and then searched for the name in the county histories. In the 1895 atlas (from which the image below was taken) the farmstead is shown as being owned by a C.S. Crittenden. But the original purchaser was Dayton Hall. He bought the land at the Kalamazoo land office, apparently in the 1850s, which is well after most of southern Michigan was settled.
Did I find any interesting anecdotes about Dayton Hall? No, not really. All I found, other than the fact that he was the first buyer of this land, was that he served as one of the two elected highway commissioners in 1852. Did he have an interest in getting a road to go conveniently past his new farm? Hard to say, but in this case having the road follow the section line, instead, would not be an easy construction project even now.
From the looks of the old map, the road didn’t used to make such a gentle, sweeping curve on the south. It was more like a right-angle turn in the old days. I’ve marked the approximate path of the current road in red.
According to my UniversalMap, that road that goes to the west on the south side of the farmstead is one that still exists, as a gravel road. I’ve never noticed it. One gets up a little speed riding down around this little curve. Maybe I’ve always enjoyed the place too much to even notice that gravel side road.
It looks like there used to be a school a half mile west. Someday I’ll have to take ride back there and take a look to see if there is still an old school building. If so, it would likely be one that’s now a residence.
(The map image is provided courtesy of www.HistoricMapWorks.com. You can click on the map to go to the page from which it was taken.)
A little ways south of that barn, perhaps on one of the places identified as belonging to an Ikes in 1895, there is an old dairy farm close to the road. I used to enjoy riding past it. In the mid 1990s, it had that silage smell characteristic of a dairy farm, and sometimes there would be school-age boys helping with farm chores. That has been a rare sight for a long time, given how the farm population of the U.S. has been aging. But it has been a long time since the place had the appearance of a two-generation family operation. I imagine those boys are grown up and living away from their old home now. And there is no longer even the smell of a dairy farm.
