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 the road. The land ahead, to the south, had been bought from the government by the person whose farm other settlers were said to have gone to. I was hoping to find a farmstead in the next half mile and sure enough, there was one right ahead on higher ground among the surrounding prairie — just the sort of place an American farmer-settler might have picked.

Googlemap-newtown

It was easy to know where to look because the roads here, while not they don’t form a perfect checkerboard, do largely follow the section lines. The googlemap shows the land isn’t quite as squared off as the area around Parish’s Grove to the north, but it is full of rectangles that make it easy to find one’s way and to know where one is.

I’m planning some riding in Ohio where it won’t be quite that simple.

This snippet is from the Puetz map of Belmont County, Ohio. This area is part of the Seven Ranges — the first part of the United States that was surveyed according to the rectangular survey system. The survey here was in neat squares — well, not quite so neat, because bugs were still being worked out of the system. But there are square mile sections. The problem is, the roads don’t follow those section lines.

The blue square above is supposed to be for the first land patent that was granted under this system. I got that information from this web site, but haven’t yet been able to verify it with lookups at the online database at the Department of Interior. But supposing the information is correct, it’s interesting to note that there is now an airport on part of that land. Maybe a piece of flat ground among the hills — a place flat enough for an airport over a century later — was what made that land attractive to one of the first buyers.

I presume the hills along the Ohio River are in part what kept roads from being built along the section lines. Note, though, that the small piece I’ve marked in red does follow a section line. The concept isn’t completely unknown in that part of the world. But far, most of the roads do not follow section lines.

The area I’m planning to visit is not quite so extreme. It has a road network that is more rectangular than that in this area near the Ohio River, but it still isn’t as rectangular as that near Newtown, Indiana, much less that of Benton County, Indiana.

So how to know where I am when I’m taking photos? Until now I’ve resisted getting a GPS. I like to use paper maps to find my way. I don’t just want to know what road to take. I want maps that can tell me about my surroundings, too. But I’ve given in somewhat. I’ve ordered the above item for my bicycle — a Sony GPS (GPS-CS1KASP). After each ride I should be able to download the data and use it to label my photo collection. I hope to get it in time for my next trip.

Here’s yet another windmill picture. This one was taken about a mile north of Parish’s Grove. At this point in the day’s ride I was still a long way from being done with windmills.

This scene may look peaceful enough — all my hours riding along Benton County’s windmills were peaceful and quiet. But surely something like this couldn’t be built without angry conflict, could it?

I wondered just how economically sustainable these towers are. I like the idea of using them for a sustainable energy supply, but I’d like them to be economically sustainable, too. Would they exist if there weren’t subsidies — subsidies of the type that usually lead to corruption and market distortions that cause problems greater than the ones they were intended to solve?

I found a couple of anti-windmill web sites:

• A blog: Blowing Our Tax Dollars on Wind Farms
• National Wind Watch

These are not exactly what I was hoping to find, though. They seem to include just about every anti-windmill argument that can be made, including some that specific to windmills or relevant to economic sustainability. It makes me wonder if there is some NIMBY going on here.

What I’d like to know is whether at some feasible level of Pigovian carbon tax these windmills would become sustainable without subsidies and tax credits. If not, I fear that these windmills might eventually become to be seen as a boondoggle. But that’s not the kind of analysis I’ve been able to find yet. So for now I just enjoy the memory of my ride through windmill country, and I hope that the people of Benton County like them, too.

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.

The 1832 militia company that was later dismissed at Parish’s Grove was said to have gone to Iroquois (in the state of Illinois) and then to Sugar Creek. The more well known Sugar Creek runs through Turkey Run and Shades state parks further south. But it wouldn’t have been that one. This Sugar Creek eventually reaches Watseka, which would have been another 10-12 miles of riding beyond Iroquois. But without knowledge of the trails that were in use in 1832, I decided that I really had no idea of where to go to follow in the path of that militia company. They said Sugar Creek, and this was Sugar Creek, so I would call this crossing good enough. I did know that they went to Iroquois, so I would end my ride there. Even at that, I was still 16 miles short of my final destination for the day.

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 where the hill gives way to the plain.

The Wikipedia article about the place tells us about the person from whom it got its name: “Parish Grove was home to a group of local Pottawatomie Indians led by Chief Parish (real name Pierre Moran), the son of French trader Constant Moran and a Kickapoo woman. Parish died on or around 1826 and is buried in the grove, though the grave is unmarked.”

For a while I thought it was an amazing coincidence, that a Pierre Moran here was called Peerish, just like a Pierre Moran associated with Elkhart, Indiana was called Peerish.

And the Royce maps show a Pierishe’s Village on the Eel River. One of these days I want to see if I can make a bike ride out of that one. I enjoyed last year’s ride further upstream along the Eel River. This would be an excuse for another, further downstream.

I’m pretty sure now that these are all the same person — and the same as the Perish Moran who was involved in the siege of Fort Wayne during the War of 1812.

googlemap

Here’s a googlemap showing four red markers for four places that are associated with Pierre Moran. And now I’m somewhat dismayed to see that I already visited the site of Pierishe’s village last year. I had forgotten already.

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, paw paw, sycamore, quaking ash, ironwood, water beach, elm, linn, poplar, ash, sassafras, locust, etc. As late as 1924 there were 37 varieties growing in the grove.”

An Indiana militia company of mounted rangers was disbanded here on August 6, 1832. It had organized at Attica on July 2 and marched to Iroquois in present-day Illinois (which is also where I ended the day’s ride). Some of the men were left at Iroquois while the others continued on toward the Kankakee River. But the war was over on August 2, ending with the battle at Bad Axe (or massacre at Bad Axe) far away on the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. The men marched back to Parish’s grove, where they went their separate ways.

I have a copy of the roll of this company from pages 54-55 of a partial document I got from the Alameda McCollough research library. They had it in their Black Hawk file, but did not know where it had come from, so figuring that out is an important item on my to-do list.

Tonight I looked up every one of the 90 names in the GLO land patent database, wondering if any of the men had decided to come and live in Benton County after having seen it. Sometimes that happened with military expeditions in the War of 1812 or Black Hawk war — someone who had marched through the country took a liking to it and made it a goal in life to buy land there and go to live there. But if it happened with any of the men of this expedition, they didn’t buy land from the General Land Office.

Googlemap

Here’s the obligatory googlemap.

Here’s looking to north. I had my mountaintop experience, and then it was time to go back down to the plain (as we sing in church on Transfiguration Sundays). The landscape is different now — there are trees at the old farmsteads on the plain, and windmills all over the place. But one can get an idea of why these wooded islands were such important landmarks and gathering places for Native Americans and Euro-American settlers. But it doesn’t look like it was one of the Black Hawk militia people who took the opportunity to buy this particular place from the government.

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 last year, when we drove to Rockville on US-41. But on this day I was impressed with how extensive this windfarm was. There was much more than what we had seen from US-41. In this part of the county they were in various stages of construction. None of them were operating yet.

I wondered about the economics of these windmills, and what was in it for the farmers. There is still corn planted in the fields with them, but there are driveways that need to be kept open, and I imagine it is inefficient to have to plow and plant around them.

Today I finally got around to looking it up. According to this article from the Indiana Economic Digest, a farmer will get $5000 to $9000 each year per windmill. I can see that that would make it worthwhile working the crops around them. I must have seen most of the 222 towers that are making up this windfarm. It’s the only one in Indiana, but puts Indiana in 5th place among the states for wind-produced electricity in the U.S.

I was somewhat apprehensive about Parish’s Grove, my first major Black Hawk war scare destination of the day. Would I find that it had been obliterated by the windmills? It turns out the Grove itself has been left alone, but the above photo shows windmills have been located almost next to it. (The Grove is off to the left of the photo.)

Googlemap

Later in my ride I was able to ride past some windmills that were already in operation. I had been wondering what kind of noise they made. Whatever it is, it wasn’t loud enough for me to hear. From where I saw them, they were silent and peaceful.

I like that the Indiana Economic Digest points out that this isn’t the first transformation of the landscape of this part of Indiana. The landscape had undergood a rapid transformation when the Euro-American settlers came here in the 1840s, too. In a way it’s sad to see the old agricultural landscape go, but there are a lot worse things than this that could happen to it.

Oh, the article points out that the heavy equipment needed for the construction of these windmills has laid waste to some of the roads. My bicycle can attest to that, both on paved and on gravel roads. But it didn’t make them completely unrideable.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/08/15/windmills-in-benton-county/feed/ 1 http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/08/13/oxford-indiana/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/08/13/oxford-indiana/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:49:12 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/08/13/oxford-indiana/

In Otterbein, I got a BLT sandwich at a non-franchise drive-in place along Highway 52. It was not fast food, but the bacon part of it was worth the wait.

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. There still is a bank on one corner, complete with ATM, but it’s not enough to dispel the “town that time forgot” look and feel of the place.

In the middle of the square was a small brick pavilion. I rested there in the shade and chugged water for a while, and took a few photos (It was a warm day, maybe 90F if I remember correctly.)

Oxford

Here is the day’s route. Oxford was at approximately the halfway point of the day’s ride, which ended up being a little over 72 miles long.

Whether you pass through Oxford going east to west, or north-and-south, the state highway signs direct you to the town square, and take some trouble to do it because it is definitely not a straight path through town in either direction. In most towns like this, the newer highways have long ago bypassed the old downtown area. In Oxford the roads do just the opposite. It makes me wonder if there is a story behind it — whether the town fathers were once upon a time trying to resist progress to save their downtown businesses. If that’s what they were doing it didn’t work, but they gave us a town with a little character to it anyway.

I was riding west on CR-500N, and when I came to Morehouse Road, a crooked one that doesn’t follow the rectangular grid, I decided to turn north. Those are often the more interesting roads, and who knows, this one followed one of the early trails.

This is the first intersection north of 500N.

Googlemap

It was a mistake to head north, though. I had only county maps with me, and not a regional map that showed how all the places related to each other. So I got a little mixed up. I thought I needed to be further to the north. It would have been better for me to head straight west.

I did several miles on gravel. My detour took me to the most uninteresting terrain on the whole day’s ride. There were level fields of corn and soybeans, nicely mowed ditches, and the sparcely located farmsteads didn’t have much of the worked-in look that some of the more interesting farmsteads have. But here there was a field of wildflowers alongside the road, so it was worth a stop.

But from the point of this photo on, the country was not particularly interesting. In fact, I was starting to wonder just what it was I liked about riding in this part of the world. It wasn’t until a few miles after my long, inadvertent detour was over that I remembered.