The Spokesrider

The old Michigan Road, north from Rochester, Indiana, is a reasonably nice place for a bicycle. U.S. 31 now bypasses the old road, leaving this one good for riding. This afternoon I made a map showing the route of the old Michigan Road through the entire length of Indiana, from the Madison on the Ohio [...]

A lot of the roads in the upper midwest follow section lines, creating a checkerboard pattern on the landscape. A lot of roads depart from these section lines, too. At this intersection in Fulton County Indiana, County Road 400W follows a section line. County Road 475N does not. Instead, it follows what had once been [...]

This photo was taken September 10 a few miles south of Rochester, Indiana.  Talk about your mixed blessings.  Technology yields cheap food, which means that instead of living at a subsistence level we are wealthy enough to take time off from work to ride out and see the countryside.   It also makes it possible [...]

I came across this school on my September 11 ride from Rochester to Little Turtle’s village on the east side of Columbia City, IN. It’s on the Fort Wayne Road — the old route from Rochester to Fort Wayne before Highway 14 took over that role. It’s called the Prill School. The brickwork is almost [...]

One of the provisions of the 1826 treaty was for the government to build a mill for the Potawatomi people here. This place was called Potawatomi Mills before it was called Rochester. So how it was that the road commissioner thought he could take that land to sell to investors to pay for road construction, I don’t know.

This is a snippet of a Fulton County map I was working on last weekend. For my Black Hawk Slept Here website I want to build a collection of maps showing a) historical sites relating to the Black Hawk war and settlement era, and b) bicycleable routes to these places. It’s fun working with maps [...]

Wednesday of this past week I did a bike ride in the Rochester area. We stayed at a motel in Rochester this time instead of camping as usual. There is a private campground out of town where I remember camping on a self-contained tour six years ago. I was in a grassy area on one [...]