On Monday’s ride, I stopped to look at this milkweed plant along the border between Barry and Allegan counties. The field behind it looked prairie-like. Did Scales Prairie extend this far to the west? A modern map I use for riding shows the prairie, but doesn’t delineate its boundary.

So tonight I worked at making a map of this part of Barry County. My progress so far is shown here. My bike route is shown in green. H marks the place I wrote about yesterday, where I stopped to take a photo of hay cutting.

I imported the pre-settlement vegetation data from the Michigan Natural Features Inventory that I’ve also used elsewhere so I could see the extent of the prairie. M marks the place where I took my photo, and yes, it looks like Scales Prairie extends over to the west edge of the township. The trees on the horizon in the photo seem to correspond with the non-prairie lobe that almost divides the prairie, shown to the right of the M.

But the people who made the map didn’t classify this place as prairie. Instead, they classified it as oak savanna. So it makes me wonder, were the people in Barry County so desperate to have prairie openings (which are more common in the counties to the south) that they decided to call their savanna a prairie? Or is there a deficiency in the algorithm that was used to classify the data for the MNFI?

The map does show a little prairie opening at B. That one is known as Bull’s Prairie. In that case the settlers’ definition of a prairie agrees with the MNFI classification.

I was also surprised to see that there was an area of oak savanna near the land that Anishinaabe people had bought from the government in the 1840s or 1850s (shown in yellow and marked A). I even rode through it. I do remember seeing one old farmhouse in a place that I didn’t expect to be good farmland. It was near the southeast corner of that savanna area.

Ah, yes, I even took a photo. Here it is. I don’t recall seeing much evidence of farming in the area. There were more residences than I had expected, though. I suppose the land along the Thornapple River is valuable waterfront.

Back to Scales Prairie. This disk was near the location marked D on the map. (I wish I had a camera with a GPS that would record the exact location of my photos. I’m not interested in using a GPS-based map system for finding my way. I like using paper maps, including old maps from the 19th century. In that sense I’m a low-tech kind of rider. But I wouldn’t mind using GPS technology to document where I’ve been.)