This antique shop is just across the road from Grissom AFB, north of Kokomo. I wanted to get a photo of the big planes that were parked next to US-31. We had seen them a couple of days earlier after Myra picked me up at the end of a ride in Peru. But I hadn’t remembered where those planes were in relation to anything else, and didn’t want to go to any more effort (i.e. extra miles) than I already had. So I contented myself with this photo and then rode on to Bunker Hill.

What I really wanted to do was visit the site of Squirrel’s Reserve. Squirrel (aka Niconzah) was a Miami leader who lived in this area in the 1820s and 1830s. The boundaries of this reserve (which is just one in a series of places where he lived) are shown on an old county atlas. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can even say that if you look at the tree line in this photo, that you’re seeing part of his former reserve. A corner of it was less than a mile from here, though. The west boundary of the reserve was roughly three tenths of a mile (m/l) from the east boundary of Grissom AFB. The east boundary is in Bunker Hill.

There are some mentions of Squirrel in the John Tipton papers — in all three volumes. It sounds as though his village on this reserve contained a few brick homes. There is correspondence about having them appraised when Squirrel was made to move in 1838, which sounds as though there may have been as many as five brick homes worth $600 each. I have no idea if any of those are still standing. The only brick home of a Miami leader that I know of for sure is one that I stopped at much later on the day’s ride.

But before taking off I noticed the Front Porch Primitives sign on this antique shop. I figured it would come in handy at Front Porch Republic, which is a blog about “Place. Limits. Liberty.” I especially like that blog when there are articles and comments about those three topics, and not as much otherwise. Maybe that makes me a Front Porch Primitive, just like the sign says. (It also says, “Antiques and more…”, which also seems like a good fit for me these days.)

I’ve decided that the photo goes with a recent article titled, “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” which had a few of us snarking at some uncatholic church signs we’ve seen on the road, including this one which I saw on a ride in Tennessee a few years ago.

There seems to be a heavy sprinkling of Catholics on Front Porch Republic, amongst the usual crowd of scoffers and who knows what. I’m not Catholic myself, even though I gladly recite the creed that says, “I believe…in the holy catholic church…” Catholic and uncatholic church signs and symbols do catch my attention on the road.

But what about that word, “Primitive”? Who wants to be called that? In my reading about Baptist missionaries among the Native people (and about anti-missionary baptists) I came to learn that there are such things as Primitive Baptists. I used to roll my eyes upon reading about the quarrels among these and other Baptists. But a book I’m currently reading in my ongoing search for bicycle destinations is starting to make them more interesting to me. The book is, “At Home in the Hoosier Hills : Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810-1870″ by Richard F. Nation (2005). I’m not sure what Nation’s background is, but he gives all the southern hill country Baptists a more sympathetic treatment than you get in most academic histories. And he says that the Primitive Baptists and Catholics in southern Indiana had a lot in common. I’m not going to explain until I understand it better myself. Get the book and read at least as far as pages 74-75.

It would be interesting to put some of the Front Porch Catholics and Primitive Baptists together in the same room and see if you’d end up with any Front Porch Primitives (in yet another sense of the term).

No riding today.