Sheltered by the Great Miami

(September 26, continued)

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Jeff told about a historic marker for a War of 1812 blockhouse at Logansville, north of DeGraff. I figured out that I had once ridden through Logansville, but this time wanted to go there and pay more attention. Unfortunately, that meant a little more riding into the north-northeast wind. I crossed the Great Miami River at Quincy, and decided to ride along the west side of the river, where I hadn’t ever been before.

That turned out to be a wise choice. This turned out to be the low road, almost at the level of the water, which was an easy stone’s throw away. Trees along the river provided good shelter from the wind.

A fisherman on foot came up behind me after I took this photo. We had a long visit about the river and the area. He mentioned that he used to take care of Alan Eckert’s place near Bellefountaine. I hadn’t known that Eckert lived in the area. (I mentioned this to someone else a few days later, who told me he wasn’t sure whether or not Eckert still had a home in the area. He had moved here after doing some of his research.)

I have grown somewhat wary of Eckert’s books, because with his blend of fiction and history he put some ideas in my head that it took a long time for me to root out. But I have to give him a lot of credit for getting me started on this sort of bicycle travel. He gives information about exactly where, in modern terms, a lot of events took place. It was reading his books that first made me want to go look at those places, which I did for the first time in 1996. And I used some of his information for my 2005 ride to places south of DeGraff.

The 1880 history of Logan County is online in a couple of places, including Google Books. After looking at that plus the 1875 county atlas that’s online at Historic Map Works, I came to the conclusion that the land just ahead on this road had probably been owned by John Means, who was one of the few settlers in this township who had come before the War of 1812. From the section on Pleasant Township (page 360):

On the other side of the river, John Means came about this time [1810] and erected his cabin. This was familiar territory to him, as he had carried chain for the surveyor who made the original surveys in this country…. Means was the first settler west of the river, and a man of some property; a fact that carried considerable influence with it in the early community.

I was also able to find information about others who had owned land further north along the west side of the river, but they were latecomers. These days I’m fascinated by those middle times when the landscape was being transformed from Native village-oriented hunting and farming to the intensive, homestead-oriented farming of the European-American settlers — and the times when there were still interactions between the two cultures. People who came later after the Native peoples had been deported and the landscape had already undergone this transformation are less interesting to me. That’s probably a good thing, or I’d never get anywhere on these rides.

This photo was taken later at Logansville, after I had spent some time looking at the probable location of the blockhouse. When I looked up from my camera, I saw that the wind had blown my bike over.

I can get pretty wimpy about riding into the wind, and as I was studying the places I had ridden I started to question whether the wind had really been brisk enough that it should have influenced my choice of routes. Then I saw this photo and remembered that it had indeed. But it’s good for memories of such things to grow dim, or I might not be foolish enough to go out for more rides like this.