The Spokesrider

I noticed that I still hadn’t added Charlie Myer’s Backroads of Indiana to my blogroll.  I’ve now done so. The photo is one I took last October 21 when approaching Rockville in Parke County.   That day’s ride was from Crawfordsville to Rockville to Terre Haute.   I took a Charlie Myer route almost all the way.   [...]

On my first ride to Bridgeton, Indiana, in September 2006, I rode in from the northeast. We had camped the night before at the Racoon Lake State Recreation Area. I wanted some photos to go with the story of Isaac McCoy’s Baptist Indian Mission here, from the late 18teens. I had little idea of what [...]

An examination of the 1874 atlas didn’t seem to suggest there were any property lines that would have remained even then to mark the treaty line of 1820 that formed the north boundary of Royce Area 114. (This is in contrast to the more famous Ten O’Clock line from the 1809 treaty, where there are [...]

This is the Ten O’Clock Road northwest of Rockville, IN. It was just irregular enough to make for pleasant riding, but it certainly wasn’t arrow-straight like a treaty line road. There is a reason for that. It doesn’t follow the treaty line anywhere. I had at first guessed it followed the line mostly, but that [...]

I was puzzled about this road in Parke County, Indiana when I did my ride there last October 7. I wanted to visit the marks left by the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line, but despite what the street sign said, this was too far north. The road ran roughly parallel to the treaty line, but I [...]

This map is an experiment to see if I can do anything useful by way of overlaying information on top of snippets of the Royce Area maps from The Library of Congress’s web site. I downloaded the jpeg2000 version of the Indiana map, then used the free ER Viewer program from ermapper.com to extract as [...]

This millstone was pulled out of Raccoon Creek by a backhoe last year. The miller told me about it on my first ride to Bridgeton, in September 2006. Arsonists had burned the covered bridge down, and as I understand it, a backhoe operator found it when doing some cleanup work in the creek afterwards. Or [...]