The Spokesrider

I used this photo in a talk I gave for the Delton Area Rotary Club this Thursday morning. My friend Wes Knollenberg had invited me. We’ve known each other since at least 1981, but don’t see a lot of each other, and especially not in the last several years. The photo is from Fulton County, [...]

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 [...]

This is the gravesite of Nawehquageezhik (Noonday) and his wife, Somonoque, at the east end of Cressey Road in Barry County, Michigan. The gravestone is in the mowed area to the right of the bicycle. This story of this gravestone is connected with another gravestone near Vincennes, Indiana, that I’m hoping to ride to this [...]

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.