September 26, continued.
Last time I had been here I had turned south on Loramie-Washington Road to go to the Piqua Historical Area. This time I wanted to ride east on Houston Road. But the road was closed. I rode on, anyway. Sometimes a bicycle can get through a construction zone where a car can’t.
A bridge was closed for repairs. But right next to one of the cement trucks waiting its turn to discharge its load was a historical marker.
“This is what I came to see,” I told the driver, who was out standing in front of it, cellphone at his ear. He told me he had lived in the area all his life and had not known about it. He was calling his girlfriend, also from the area, to ask what she knew about it. He thought it was a shame that the site was not better cared for. But I thought it was holding up pretty well, even if it would not be easily noticed among the roadside weeds unless one was looking for it.
One thing I hadn’t expected to learn was that this site was along General Harmar’s trail. I knew he had gone through this area in 1790 on his way to defeat by Little Turtle at a stream crossing north of Fort Wayne. (I visited one of the sites of his defeat back in fall 2004 and told about it here.) But it made sense that he had come through here. He stopped at Loramie’s Store (where I had started my ride this morning) on his way to the St. Mary’s River. (More about his route is here.)
And now I’ve been learning that the canal later passed through here, too. The waterway was probably somewhere behind the barn in the background of the photo. So this county road which is now so little travelled that a bridge outage doesn’t create much of a disruption was once a major travel route for the Native peoples. It was also the route for an army that came to subdue them and then, presumably, the route by which the retreating army returned to Cincinnati. It was the route of the Miami-Erie canal, the major north-south transportation route for some years.
Later a railroad came through and supplanted the canal. Now this is just a quiet county road with only this marker to give a hint of its earlier importance. The major transportation route is now I-75, several miles to the east.
I was curious about the James Thatcher, who had been the first of the Euro-American settlers in this area (not counting the traders like Loramie or the British traders a few miles to the south who were driven out by the French in 1752.) It seems that the local historians didn’t know much about him or where he had come from.
I wondered if he had learned about the area from the soldiers who had been with Harmar. I collect stories like that. But a quick, superficial search didn’t turn up anything. He appears in the census record for 1820, but according to this Shelby County history page, he had moved several miles to the northwest by then.
Howe’s 1888 history says this site where he settled in 1804 (or 1805) was called Painter’s Run. Today the bridge over Painter’s Run was closed. I still had another site to visit further west on Houston Road. If I turned back to go to take a detour around it, I’d have to change my whole itinerary for the day. There was a wind from the northeast and I didn’t want to go south and add extra miles to ride in that direction. But I took a look up close and saw that the creek bed was dry. I was able to walk my bicycle across and back up onto the road to my next stop.
Before leaving I took this photo of the door of one of the county highway department’s trucks. I like maps of many kinds, including this one which shows the county’s townships. (I later noticed that some other Ohio counties have similar logos on their highway department trucks.) This truck had the honor of working this day on what had once been a major transportation corridor.
