This photo was taken at the east end of several miles of straight, flat riding east of the Great Miami River, south of Sidney, on the last Sunday in September. The wind for this stretch had been somewhat against me.

Twice on this outing I had ended up east of the Great Miami, against the wind, in relatively flat, uninteresting country. Usually when I’m bicycling in new or seldom-seen country I don’t use my MP3 player. I save that mostly for commuting. But sometimes when I slog into the wind I will pull it out. These were two of those rare times.

What I now have on my MP3 player for times like this is the sound track from Obyknovennoye chudo. Besides using that movie to work on my Russian, it’s a good one for providing an energy boost. There are several music selections of a kind one might find in old James Bond movies, or Broadway show tunes, and who knows what else, that make the miles go by quickly. And that’s what happened this time, too. It may also have helped that the wind changed and opposed me less after I started listening. Or at least it seemed to.

This is part of the Shelby County map from the top of handlebar bag, plus some extra stuff I’ve drawn on it since. The blue line is the first part of my route for that afternoon. The photo was taken somewhere in the lower right, where the route turns to the north-northwest.

The yellow line is from a bike ride done the Friday before. The heavy black line is the Great Miami River. There are also miscellaneous marks I had made to mark some of my intended history stops, but I won’t write about those this time.

The red square on the upper left is a “congressional township.” Congressional townships in Michigan usually correspond to the current political townships. They were the ones defined by the acts of Congress that caused the land to be surveyed in preparation for sale.

Congressional townships contain 36 sections (square miles), six wide and six high. They are numbered as shown here, with section 1 in the upper right and section 36 in the lower right. That’s the numbering system that was used throughout most of the U.S. where the rectangular survey system was used. But in Ohio one also finds another system:

The part of Shelby County that lies east of the Great Miami is numbered according to this system. The map above shows one such township, or rather, part of one, on the right.

I found it confusing when I first looked at the map of this area and tried to identify places according to Township, Range, and Section. The Section numbers just weren’t in the right order. But I learned that from 1788 through 1796, that was the right order.

That older system happens to match the sequence used by the surveyors when they were doing the interior lines of a township. A surveyor who is active in the history of surveying once wondered aloud to me whether there may have been cheating. Think about it. The surveyors start on the bottom end between sections 1 and 7, work their way to the north between sections 6 and 12 (doing the east-west lines to the east as they go north.) Then they have to haul all their stuff 6-7 miles back to the base, between sections 7-13, and work their way north again. It would have been tempting to survey that line every 2nd line from north to south instead. There was a certain amount of fraud and near-fraud committed by surveyors, so I suppose it could have happened.

Here is a web page that gives a brief description of the change from the old system to the new system of numbering.

One thing I wish I could find is a discussion of the reason why the change was made. Lowell O. Stewart’s 1935 book, “Public Land Surveys,” says, “The reason for the change is not clear.” I can’t recall reading an explanation in any of the books on the subject which I’ve read that have been published since 1935, either.

One other thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to do is produce of a photo of the landscape to illustrate the numbering. So on that Sunday afternoon, even though I knew I was riding through one of the rare parts of the country numbered according to the old system, I just put my head down and listened to a movie soundtrack as I rode through.