Parish’s Grove

I hung around Parish’s Grove for a while. To the west and north of it were windmills.

Here it is, the highest point in Benton County. Some of the grove remains. According to Wikipedia, “[i]t originally covered about 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) and contained an abundant variety of trees, including oaks, walnuts, hickory, dogwood, haw, paw paw, sycamore, quaking ash, ironwood, water beach, elm, linn, poplar, ash, sassafras, locust, etc. As late as 1924 there were 37 varieties growing in the grove.”

An Indiana militia company of mounted rangers was disbanded here on August 6, 1832. It had organized at Attica on July 2 and marched to Iroquois in present-day Illinois (which is also where I ended the day’s ride). Some of the men were left at Iroquois while the others continued on toward the Kankakee River. But the war was over on August 2, ending with the battle at Bad Axe (or massacre at Bad Axe) far away on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. The men marched back to Parish’s grove, where they went their separate ways.

I have a copy of the roll of this company from pages 54-55 of a partial document I got from the Alameda McCollough research library. They had it in their Black Hawk file, but did not know where it had come from, so figuring that out is an important item on my to-do list.

Tonight I looked up every one of the 90 names in the GLO land patent database, wondering if any of the men had decided to come and live in Benton County after having seen it. Sometimes that happened with military expeditions in the War of 1812 or Black Hawk war — someone who had marched through the country took a liking to it and made it a goal in life to buy land there and go to live there. But if it happened with any of the men of this expedition, they didn’t buy land from the General Land Office.

Googlemap

Here’s the obligatory googlemap.

Here’s looking to north. I had my mountaintop experience, and then it was time to go back down to the plain (as we sing in church on Transfiguration Sundays). The landscape is different now — there are trees at the old farmsteads on the plain, and windmills all over the place. But one can get an idea of why these wooded islands were such important landmarks and gathering places for Native Americans and Euro-American settlers. But it doesn’t look like it was one of the Black Hawk militia people who took the opportunity to buy this particular place from the government.