The Spokesrider

On Wednesday August 6 I wanted to see if there was still a farmstead at a place in Fountain County, Indiana, where a false scare of Indian war had taken place in 1826. It was a place where other settlers were said to have gone for safety. I stopped here at a half-mile post along [...]

Eleven miles later I came to this bridge over Sugar Creek on Indiana state route 71. The windmills here were already in operation, spinning slowly in the gentle wind at my back, but I didn’t hear a thing from them. So I don’t know how close to them a person has to be and how fast they have to be spinning before one can hear a noise that might be bothersome.

It appears that these cows aren’t allowed to use the windmills as back-scratching posts and shade trees. This is looking northeast from Parish’s Grove. Or maybe the area in this scene was considered part of Parish’s Grove back in the day. This view is a little further north of the other one. It’s a place [...]

I hung around Parish’s Grove for a while. To the west and north of it were windmills. Here it is, the highest point in Benton County. Some of the grove remains. According to Wikipedia, “[i]t originally covered about 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) and contained an abundant variety of trees, including oaks, walnuts, hickory, dogwood, haw, [...]

August 3, continued. I turned north a couple of miles west of Boswell. I had already seen windmills a ways back — I was apparently getting into windfarm country. (There wasn’t a lot of wind that day–just a gentle breeze from the south-southwest.) I think I had seen some of the windmills in Benton County [...]

I didn’t really start enjoying the countryside, though, until I got to Oxford. The road takes one to an old town square. There is no courthouse, but the streets are paved with brick and there are old brick store buildings around it. It must have been a lively place for shopping once upon a time.

My first major goal for the day was Parish’s Grove in Benton County. It was a place where toward the end of the Black Hawk war a militia company had been dismissed. I got more interested when I learned from Wikipedia that the Kickapoo leader Perish (Pierre) Moran had been buried here, and that it [...]