A country church and a pile of rubble

(Sep 28, cont.) About 1.5 miles after stopping to take the photo of Martindale Creek, I stopped for another photo for documentation purposes.

I remember that stop. I was standing in a long, gravel driveway that led to a farmplace that was back from the road. I remember deciding not to point my camera in that direction, but I don’t remember why. Instead I took a photo of the church at the top of the small hill to the east.

Now that I’ve looked at the 1882 county history the place is more interesting to me.

My route is shown in light brown on the map above — a map of West River township from that same county history. The stop at Martindale Creek is marked with a red dot on the left, and the stop for this photo was at the red dot on the line between sections 10 and 11.

The father of the Jonah L. Catey who in 1882 owned the land on which I was standing was William Catey. His name is still shown on a county plat map from the 1870s. His farm was the one now owned (in 1882) by J.L. Catey — the one I didn’t take a photo of. On that older map it looks like he used a different driveway back then, one that left the road very near the church at the edge of his property and cut across to the southwest to his place. I suspect it’s because the higher ground was dry enough to make a more reliable road. One can still see traces of it on Googlemap satellite view.

I didn’t find any particularly interesting anecdotes about William Catey or his son, Jonah, but the family got interesting when I found this Rootsweb site that gives some of the genealogy. The interesting part was that one of William’s brothers and one of his sisters had married into a family that had names like Joseph Rippey and Matthew Rippey. Those were familiar names to me. And yes, further investigation shows that it’s the same Rippey family that had settled near Leesburg Indiana, the same Rippey family that produced a Matthew Rippey who lived near Goshen at the time of the Black Hawk war scare. He and a neighbor had made a walking trip down to Kosciousko County, to land not yet ceded by the Potawatomi to the United States, to check on the Indians and their reaction to the Black Hawk news.

Leesburg was the kind of place that got me started on the Black Hawk Slept Here project. It itself had made such a vivid and lasting impression on me (as had many things on that day) that the next year I rode down to visit it and check it out more closely. One of the things I looked for was a big brick house that had belonged to one of Rippeys who had moved there, perhaps (and here I’m guessing) on the advice of the Matthew Rippey who had scouted out the land while he was checking up the Indians. Alas, it had been torn down not so long before, and all that was left was a big pile of masonry and concrete rubble. A gravel and cement operation had begun to take over. I couldn’t remember whether a house had still been standing in 1996.

The last time I rode there was in October 2006. I see that I’ve done only one blog entry about it, here. It has a map showing my route past the Rippey place just south of town.

Ah, good. I see I took a photo of the rubble. The pile may have been pushed closer to the road since 1997, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

So in summary I could say that the church scene in the top photo is now a more interesting place to me because it has a connection to this pile of rubble south of Leesburg. Such excitement one can get from bike touring!