We just got back from a couple of days in Nappanee, IN. Monday we did things that didn’t involve our bicycle, including a tour of Martin’s Buggy Shop. This photo shows part of the large inventory of wheels. Those parts are built elsewhere — perhaps in Holmes County, Ohio, IIRC.

We learned about the place from Steve, our host at the B&B where we stayed. He had given us a map of Amish businesses and shops that welcome tourists, but then said there were others in addition to those on the map, such as this shop where buggies are made.

LeRoy Martin, the owner, is not Amish, though. His family belongs to the Yellow Creek Mennonite Church. I had ridden past that church a couple of times in previous years, and was somewhat taken aback by the men who dressed much like the Amish, and who drove buggies, but who were clean shaven. LeRoy Martin is one of those.

I asked if it was OK to take photos and he said it was fine, though he didn’t care to pose for any. So this is one I took while he was busy on the phone talking with customers — most of whom are not Amish or Mennonite.

Today I got in a good bicycle ride. It was 76 miles, a little more than I had wanted, but not bad because the wind was mostly at my back.

YTD mileage: 1355

There were two major destinations for my April 18 ride. This was near the first one, near the northwest corner of the old Mickkesawbe Reserve in Branch County.

The north border of that reserve is Jonesville Road. That road is bicycleable enough but it does carry more traffic than other roads in the area. So I took Williams Road, a gravel road, to minimize the amount of riding on Jonesville.

There I came across the above building across from the driveway to an Amish farm. People sometimes put up little structures like this so kids can have some protection from the elements while waiting for the school bus. It made me wonder if the Amish people in this area use the public schools. (I don’t know.)

And here I was heading south, approaching the intersection I had come to see. Well, my destination was actually 60 rods to the west of the intersection. Tonight I was going to explain how the Potawatomi Indians resisted the government surveyor’s attempt to make the reservation boundary coincide with the section lines. There is still a visible mark on the landscape that came about because of that disagreement. But tonight I got distracted.

James Tompkins was the person who told the writer of the 1879 Branch County history about the discrepancy on the ground that came about here. This James Tompkins is the same person on whose land grew the apple trees that some Potawatomi women decided to cut down. On a ride last year I met a descendant of Tompkins. She still living on the land where he lived. But tonight I got distracted by one aspect of that story that I had not thought about before. It was in this passage on page 232:

…Anger and hatred were depicted by face and gesture. The squaws demanded to be paid for sparing the tree. At this juncture William McCarty came up, and as he understood the Indian dialect he acted as mediator, and peace was once more restored by Mr. Tompkins agreeing to give the squaws a certain amount of flour.

Hmmm. Here was a farmer settler, newly arrived in this place, who knew enough of the Potawatomi language to be useful in settling a dispute. I wondered if there was more information about him and his background.

I learned that the land patent for McCarty’s first land entry in the county says he was from Wayne County (the county that includes Detroit). And that eventually led me to the fact that McCarty was an officer in the War of 1812, when Detroit was captured by the British, and that he had inlaws with connections to some well known incidents and characters in American history, including the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, and persons such as Albert Gallatin and perhaps Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben. I haven’t found out just where McCarty learned to speak Potawatomi, but it’s not too hard to see where he might have had opportunities.

And there is an amusing anecdote in his wife’s family history that is an ironic parallel to the incident with the apple trees. It’s amusing to me, anyway. I’ll write that up after I get some photos to go with it. For that I need another bike ride.

I was planning an overnight bike ride to Cass County this weekend, but now I’m thinking I should instead go south to Branch County. It’s not just the William McCarty story that is drawing me there. The wind forecast for Sunday afternoon’s ride to Cass County keeps getting worse. It might be more pleasant to ride south instead.

googlemap

This googlemap shows the locations of the above photos.

YTD mileage 426.5

On a ride to Upper Sandusky, Ohio last September 29, I was looking for signs of an old reservation boundary in this area. There was one place where the maps had suggested there might be a piece of driveway that still remained from an old piece of road that marked the boundary. I don’t think the above driveway was it, but I was a little unsure of exactly where I was at this point, so for a couple of miles stopped and took a photo of every driveway, just to be sure I got it.

I could figure it out from my GPS track, but I have a different topic in mind today. The photo shows the rain that was approaching. I did make it to Upper Sandusky before the rains came. That was the end of several days of riding. I put the bike on the car and we drove back to Michigan.

In between rain squalls we stopped at a rest area. Something didn’t seem quite right there, with the young Amish man talking on his cell phone. It’s not impossible that an Amish person will have a cell phone. It depends somewhat on the rules of the particular Amish community. And there are Amish people in this part of Ohio. There is a large community several miles to the southwest of the above photo. And it’s not impossible to see Amish people at an Interstate highway rest stop. But these young men were driving their own car.

I wondered only a few seconds, because I quickly realized that these were Orthodox Jewish young men, not Amish. In this part of rural Ohio, and especially in the parts where I had spent my day, it’s not surprising to see Amish people. But Orthodox Jewish people? Not so common.

I was reminded of that incident by an article that Eric posted at Amish America: “Amish-Jewish pow-wow in NYC.” Some Hasidic Jews invited some Lancaster County Amish to New York City to look around and compare notes. It seems I’m not the only person to have done a double-take in that type of situation.

Actually, I was closer to my destination than that, but at the time that’s what I thought was ahead of me. My excuse: I was still riding in the Virginia Military District — land which was never surveyed into the neat grid of square mile sections that make it quick ‘n easy to estimate distances on a map.

googlemap

I wasn’t sure I would find a house with somebody out in the yard where I could ask for water, which is what I’ve done on some occasions like this. This was Amish country. Last time I stopped and asked for water at an Amish farm (three years ago) I realized I was causing more trouble than I wanted to. The people don’t have running water, and in that case it was a young couple just getting started. They had fewer household conveniences than most Amish households. They kept water in coolers in the house, and the pump was off somewhere in the yard.

I rode past another Amish farm with a sign out front advertising baked goods, nuts, and other goodies. Wait a minute! I turned around and went back. That seemed like the sort of place where it would be OK to ask for water. The sign by the door said to pull hard on the cord, which I did, and a few seconds later a young woman invited me to step in. I bought some cookies and cashews (the latter for Myra, who has since hidden them where other people can’t find them). There was a water pump just outside the door, and she pumped water for my bottles. I was glad to see it was one that was easily and quickly primed, compared to some pumps and wells like that which I have known.

Then the man of the house and two boys came around to talk. He joked about my air conditioning, asked where I was from, and where I was headed. I explained about Myra and the car, and pointed to a spot on the map. On some maps it’s labelled Pfeiffer, and on others it’s not labelled. Pfeiffer Station, he called it.

“And what do you expect to find when you get there?” he asked with a big grin. (Almost everything he said was with a big grin.) I was somewhat surprised by that question, because “find” was just the right word to fit what I was doing. “Maybe an old house,” I replied.

I wasn’t really sure what I would see there. The old county histories told about events that took place near where Judge Wheeler’s home stood. There was a good chance a judge from the 19th century would have built a brick home that was still standing, I thought, but I didn’t know for sure. It was at an old crossing point on the Scioto River. I wasn’t sure if the Judge had lived on the north or the south side, but whatever the case, I was going to see what there was to see there.

I told the man a little more of what I knew. I showed him the 1870-something map that showed that a Wheeler — probably a daughter or younger wife of the judge — had owned property near the crossing. And he told me about the old house there. There had just been an article in the paper telling all about its history. A lawyer lived there now, a man who was very interested in the history. The home had been a station on the Underground Railroad. I hadn’t known about that part, but I was pretty sure he was talking about the house I had hoped to find.

I told him that it was a place where Indians had been gathered before they were removed from the state. He hadn’t known about that, but was interested. He pointed out the road on the map — the one I was planning to take — explaining that it had once been an Indian trail. I tried to find the explanation in the notes I had with me, but couldn’t find them. I had him write his name and address in my notebook so I could mail it to him later. I’ve since found that information, and will put some of it in another post.

We also talked about other things — including Amish communities in Michigan that we both knew about. He was not familiar with the new one close to my home, though. We also talked about our gardens and how dry it had been, and what it was like to bicycle in such hot weather.

This is a photo of a farm a little further down the road from the one where I visited. During our visit I explained that I hoped to take photos of the old house and other things I hoped to find in the area, but I didn’t ask to take a photo of his farm.

I don’t like running low on water on hot days, but this wasn’t the only time that stopping to ask for water resulted in a good visit.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/09/05/begging-for-water/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/09/04/bellefontaine-to-peiffer-station/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/09/04/bellefontaine-to-peiffer-station/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:37:09 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/09/04/bellefontaine-to-peiffer-station/

This may look like a google map, but it’s just a screen shot of one, sort of. It shows the route of yesterday’s bike ride and all the places where I stopped to take photos. The temperature was in the 90s with a light wind out of the northeast (the direction where I was headed). Mileage total was about 43. I’m not sure exactly, because the bike is still on the car.

We’re back home now. I ended my bike ride in a drought-stricken area. An Amish farmer I talked to said it had never been that dry before. On our way home we drove through heavy rains in Indiana and southern Michigan — almost too heavy to be driving in — but at home it’s dry, too. We need rain.

I haven’t yet figured out how to take the data from my Sony GPS-CS1KA and move it to my regular googlemaps that I can post on the web, but the log files it produces seem to use standard GPS formats, so I have hope that it can be done.

This was taken within about 10 miles of my finish. The finish was at a good history site, but I’ll have to leave that for later.

The only experience I’ve had riding there was that time in September 2003. The multi-use trail I wrote about has been completed since then.

Holmes County Routes

What I’ve done here is mark the route I used in Holmes County that year. It wasn’t a continuous ride. One day I rode from Howard to Millersburg and then out to the campground on the highway east of Millersburg. Two days later, after we had been doing some tourist things near Bolivar, I rode back to the campground.

Some of the roads I took after I got off of state route 520 were gravel, and some had steep hills, and some had both gravel and steep hills. The road I took into Glenmont had some fast downhills that made me think I should start wearing a helmet again. (I quit in 1999, and I did finally resume wearing one in 2005 or thereabouts.) Some of the steep hills made me think that if I was going to go through country like this with full panniers, that I’d need lower gears. I put lower gears on my bike the next year.

If I remember right, the road I took along Indian Trail Creek, between Dundee and Winesburg, was a very nice, idyllic route through Amish country. It was getting late in the day, and the only pictures I have are the ones in my head.

In a previous article I quoted the 1880 history of Eaton County that said the wife of Edward O. Smith saw a large group of Potawatomi Indians during the Indian removal of 1840, the year before she died. (The county history said she died in 1842, not 1841. I would usually trust the gravestone over the history.) This cemetery is next to Edward O. Smith’s farm, though it’s not the place he was farming in 1840. And here I learned the name of his wife. She was Anna Carpenter Smith.

Her original gravestone is here under a tree, and her husband’s is the tilted, sunken one to the right of it, where it is being pushed over by the tree.

Their son’s old farmstead is across the road. There is a home on the parents’ old place too, but it’s not a place that looks so much like an old farmstead.

I tried to speculate on why in the very first years of farm-building they would have let someone else farm here one year while they went to farm another place they didn’t own a few miles to the north (where the big Indian trail crossed). Their investments in fencing and clearing were so crucial to success, and the difference between success and failure so small, that it’s hard to imagine what would have been in it for either party. I didn’t get any ideas from looking at the two places.

This part of Sunfield township was slightly more rolling than I had expected, but most people would call it flat. The cemetery is on the biggest hill around. I thought it was a pretty setting — certainly a good place for a bike ride. There is a small Amish settlement just three miles to the south, but I was not fast enough to get any Sunday afternoon buggy photos there.

Before Michigan became a state, a national military road was built to connect Chicago with Detroit. Territorial roads were also built. I presume they were financed by the federal government because there was no state government at the time, but I must confess that I don’t know quite how they were financed. I’ve seen old newspaper notices from the early 1830s that solicited bids for construction of the Chicago Road (i.e. the Chicago-Detroit road). I don’t know if the Territorial Roads were handled similarly.

Territorial Road

The Territorial Road in the photo, now a county road, runs parallel to the Ohio border in Hillsdale County, and only a half mile from it. It seems a strange place for one of the first roads in the state. Roads didn’t usually just run along the border — they tended to connect centers of activity – or future centers of activity. The 1879 history of Hillsdale County says it was established in 1832, at the same time as the Black Hawk war. There are other, more authoritative sources of information about early roads, but none handy to me at the moment. So for now I’ll just have to add this to my long list of questions to wonder about.

My youngest son and I rode along this road on a Sunday afternoon in June 2000. We came on an Amish buggy towing three young men on roller blades. Two of them were being towed by tow ropes at any one instant, while the 3rd coasted. They would hand off one of the ropes to the one coasting in a sort of braiding-the-ropes sequence, the one coasting would give himself a big boost with the tow rope, and then hand off to the next one coasting. A girl was driving the buggy for them. We followed them a long ways, it seemed, finally catching up to them when they stopped by the side of the road to catch their breath. “Looking good!” I told them as we passed by. One of them nodded and smiled in acknowledgement. The Amish people who live here are more conservative than those further west, to judge by their clothes, but that doesn’t mean not having fun on Sunday afternoons.

On the ride to Mongo on May 31, I tried something different when I got to the south end of Farrand Road. Every time before I’ve turned left. This time I turned right to go to the spot on the map called Findley.

I was surprised to see that there actually is a community at the spot on the map, with a larger cluster of houses than I had expected. Not only that, but there is a businessplace.

The sign on this elevator says Burr Oak in smaller letters underneath the rest. I enjoy riding through Burr Oak now and then, but I would not have expected it to be big enough to have a branch office anywhere else. Yet here it is: Findley Feeds. There is even a hitching post out front.

From Findley I rode south on gravel for a couple of miles. This, too, was a new road for me. I suppose the hitching post back in Findley actually gets used, as there are quite a few Amish people in this part of the county.

I’ve already written about the surprise of my first-ever ride to Topeka in LaGrange County, Indiana. This was the road by which I rode on that day in 1997. The above sign about “Life in the Past Lane” wasn’t there back then.

This is downtown Topeka, facing west (again). Just down the street and on the right is a gas station/convenience store where I usually fuel up with a Subway BLT. I had timed my arrival in Topeka for a noon lunchtime break.

Topeka has a town marshall. (I also see that I took a photo of myself in the window.) I wondered if most Indiana towns have a “marshall” as opposed to police officers. It’s a term that seemed it would better fit Topeka, Kansas. But you never know. A great-grandfather of mine was a town marshall in Olivia, MN, back in the 1890s. So it isn’t just a term used out west.

Topeka had been called HawPatch until the railroad builders came through. The place reminded them of Topeka, Kansas, and the name got changed.

This was one of my destinations. Unlike Topeka (Hawpatch), it’s a place I had never been to before. It’s on State Hwy 5, just three miles southwest from Topeka, just across the line in Noble County.

Last year I had noticed the wooden historical markers like the above one elsewhere in the county. I learned that a lot of these markers have been erected, and that there is a book that lists them. The book isn’t available online, either for reading or purchase. I didn’t want to order one not knowing whether or not it contained much other information about the signs. I figured that someday I’d get to the historical museum in Noble County, and could take a look to see if it’s something I want. In the meantime, I can ride around the county and find them by the serendipity method.

I was looking for a marker at this particular site, though. The map below, from 1874, shows a place called Hawville in Section 3 of Perry Township. I figured something liked that would deserve a marker, and there was one. I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking for it, though.

(The map image is provided by www.historicmapworks.com. You can click on the map to go to the page containing the original image.)

Although the book about the markers (written by a Martha Bushong) is not available online, it so happens that a sample of it is — in a rootsweb page about Hawville.

I wondered why the sign says 1891 when the 1874 map clearly shows it in existence long before that. The article from the book contains interesting information, but it doesn’t explain that. It refers to a 1891 newspaper clipping saying the town had recently been platted. But it doesn’t say anything about its existence back in 1874.

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