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 I’d find, so stopped here at this old iron bridge to take photos, thinking this might be the most photogenic thing I’d find that could go with the story. It turned out that there was a lot more to take photos of: A historic marker for the 1809 treaty line, a piece of road that followed the treaty line, the mill, and a covered bridge that was being rebuilt after having been burned by arsonists. And those other things were closer to the site of McCoy’s mission than this bridge, although I didn’t figure that out until some time later.

I was just now reading a description of the Big Raccoon Creek as it was at the time of the earliest European-American settlement. It made me wish I had taken better photos to accompany it. But maybe the above two give an idea. The description is in the 1880 History of Parke, on pages 6-7:

Sugar creek, through its upper course, ran, then as now, between bold and rocky bluffs, but no other creek in the county was anything like it is now. They consisted rather of long deep ponds connected by shallow ripples; and Big Raccoon, through much of its lower course, had no defined channel. Beaver dams and immense drifts obstructed its course, and for miles in a place the stream extended almost from bluff to bluff–a long swamp with a slow current. Indeed, as late as 1850, many of the creeks in the county had a more uniform volume of water in summer than now, and contained many long, deep pools joined by ripples… None of the streams rose so suddenly or so high as now, and none fell so low in the summer. … The rainfall of the year has not decreased, but it was then more evenly distributed in time. The further change is accounted for by the clearing of the land and draining of the swamps, allowing the falling rains to discharge more rapidly. Such were a few of the features of this county a hundred years ago.

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 several such marks on the map, and a few that are visible yet today.)

There is one possible exception, though. The above is a snippet of the Reserve Township map. The route of my October 7 bike ride is shown in red. In the middle of the blue circle is a triangular piece of land that is identified as being owned by a R Weight. (Or something like that. It’s not very clear on this copy.)

In fact, the photo below may have been of the building on that site. The building was definitely on the north side of the road, and was somewhere in the vicinity. Now I wish I had recorded exactly where it was, and whether the construction looked like something that could have been built before 1874.

And if I had had the 1874 atlas to study before my ride, I would have thought to look to see whether there was still an angling fencerow to mark an odd-shaped piece of property at that location. Chances are there is not, but that’s the sort of mark on the landscape that I like to look for.

But when I did this bike ride, I didn’t know I was in a place where I should look for such things. We had arrived in Rockville by car that afternoon. I simply thought I was taking a quick evening ride as a warm-up for the historical rides I would do in the next 2-3 days.

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 it twisted and turned away from the line here and there on account of the terrain. But that isn’t it at all.

This is from the 1874 atlas of Parke County. (It’s not as good a photo as I had thought I had taken. I used a tripod to hold my camera for use as a copy machine at the Rockville library, but maybe I need to do something for a light source in addition to ambient light. Any ideas on something small and compact that could be carried in my panniers or computer bag? Maybe something could be done with LEDs.)

The photo is barely good enough to make the point, though.

The treaty lines of Royce area 114 are shown inside the purple line. The Wabash River forms the boundary to the west, and the 1809 Fort Wayne treaty line forms the south boundary. The route of my bike ride is shown in green. It doesn’t follow the north treaty line at all.

Another point: The intersection shown in the previous blog article (at the brownish circle near Coloma) has been straightened out very little since 1874.

The photo shown above is probably a view overlooking Leatherwood Creek in section 21, though I’m not positive about 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 couldn’t figure out a good reason why people would have named it that.

Then, a couple of days ago, I took a look at the Royce Map. There was another treaty line that was intended to parallel the more famous Ten O’Clock line. It was an 1818 treaty by which the Wea Indians agreed to cede their land in Indiana, except for the area identified as Royce Area 114. The photo above is taken approximately at the site marked #1 on the map below.

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 good a quality jpeg file as is possible from the Library of Congress’s files. There are other versions of the Royce Area maps online, e.g. at rootsweb.com. Those are pretty good and are simpler to download and use, but they don’t give one quite the same resolution.

I then used Adobe Illustrator to mark the county boundary and the routes I took on a couple of relatively short day rides from last October. The blue dashed line northwest of Rockville is from the ride I blogged about here. The reddish dashed line to the south is one I blogged about here (identified as #2 on the map), here and here (site #1 on the route) and here (site #4).

Site #3 was on the way from the old McCoy mission site to Rosedale, on some quiet roads in the valley of the Big Raccoon Creek. It was about at that location that I took the photos below. I don’t have any excuse by which to link them to the history — but they reminded me a little bit of the old Burma Shave signs one used to see along the roads back in the 1950s.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/02/18/the-road-to-rosedale/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2007/10/20/millstone/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2007/10/20/millstone/#comments Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:19:59 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2007/10/20/millstone/

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 perhaps it was during construction of the replacement bridge.

It is not obvious that it’s a millstone, and it’s not the usual type of millstone. It doesn’t have a hole in the center for an axle. It might seem to be just a roundish, flattish rock, except that part of a machined edge is still intact, and there seems to be some sort of groove on one surface for grain.

In fact, I wonder if it isn’t some kind of edge-runner wheel which would roll vertically on the edge of a horizontal wheel on an axle. Maybe that’s what the miller had been trying to explain to me.

When the Bridge Festival in Parke County is over, maybe I can get him to tell me more about it.

It would be good to learn more about mills and mill technology. The settlers’ reminiscences from the time of the Black Hawk war are full of stories about mills. One of the scenes of fighting in the war took place near a mill site, and may have been payback by Potawatomi people who were upset over what a mill dam had done to fishing. One of the more entertaining war scare stories took place at a mill. Mills, or the lack of them, played a memorable part in surviving the first winter or two. There are stories about mill dressers and the hauling of millstones.

So far I’ve come across a couple of good web sites about old milling technology:

A Theodore R. Hazen has information about mill restoration, including a section on “how to site a mill.” I’ve often wished I knew how to analyze the terrain where remnants of old mill dams are sometimes still visible. I’m amazed at how people used to do it without the benefit of detailed topo maps. A lot of the towns and small cities in the midwest grew up around these mill sites, but there were also a lot of mill sites didn’t work out quite so well.

And here is one from the Peak District in England, which includes not only information about millstones, but also other information about “industrial archaeology.”

The stop at Pipeline road was towards the end of my Monday ride (October 8). At the beginning I got mixed up on my way out of Rockville, and ended up at a tourist place known as Billie Creek. It has one of Parke County’s many covered bridges.

But since I was here, I stopped to get a photo before heading back towards Rockville. While doing so, a van with an older couple pulled up. Well, maybe not much older than me. They wanted to know if there were any more bridges than this, and how one went about touring the bridges. I pleaded the ignorance of an outsider, but told them that if they went towards town and stopped at the visitor center on their left, they could get a map that would show them where the bridges were. It’s also the map I was using for bicycling. They seemed pleased to get that much information from me.

Bridgeton was one of my destinations. This is where I had meant first stop to be — not Billie Creek. It’s near the old Isaac McCoy mission school, too.

In fall 2006 I had ridden here and had a chance to ask the owner if he knew where the Isaac McCoy mission had been. He knew about McCoy, but all he could say about the location was that it had been somewhere around there. Here is the Bridgeton Mill web site. But he did know a lot about the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line, which runs just on the other side of Raccoon Creek from the mill.

This year I had done a little more research and had a pretty good idea where McCoy’s mission had been. It had been a few miles to the southwest. But I wanted to stop here first, anyway, to connect my rides together. I like to ride roads I’ve never been on before, but I like them to connect to places I already have been.

There were tourists here, beating the rush of the upcoming Bridge Festival, I suppose. I was minding my camera when a woman commented that I had ridden a long way.

What (I thought)? How did she know where I had come from. Was it obvious that I was from Michigan?

But she was the woman in the van at Billie Creek. She was impressed that I had ridden so far. (It was maybe a little over ten miles from Billie Creek–not all that far–but I don’t mind if people are impressed.)

Next thing she was telling another tourist about me. Turns out this other tourist and her husband had a hobby (obsession?) of visiting covered bridges. I wish I had written down the number she told me, but they had visited far more covered bridges in Pennsylvania (where they were from), Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere than I would ever have guessed existed. I took a photo of her next to the Bridgeton bridge, but we haven’t yet made e-mail contact so I can get a release from her to post it. She told me about a web site that lists all the covered bridges. I don’t think this is the one she meant, but it starts to give the idea.

I hung around Bridgeton for a while before heading on over to what I think is most likely the McCoy mission site.

Last week Monday, after visiting the likely site of Isaac McCoy’s mission in Raccoon Township, Parke County, Indiana, I headed west to Rosedale and then north back to Rockville along the Catlin Road.

That last stretch was an especially pleasant ride. There had been a wind out of the southwest all day, and now it was finally at my back.

But it was also nice the way the road followed the edge of the valley of Little Raccoon Creek. I should someday compile a list of these types of roads. The bottom of the valley is flat and is good farmland. In the photo above, corn is growing down in this valley. Little Raccoon Creek is off by the distant trees. Rather than have the road use up good farmland, it was made to run just along the lower edge of the side of the valley, just high enough that one can have a view of the valley bottom.

Another place like this is the Valley Road in southern Van Buren County, Michigan, which looks out over the Dowagiac Creek valley. There was also one in Kalamazoo County, closer to my home, along the lower end of Gull Creek, until a few years ago when the Galesburg Schools destroyed it by building a new high school there, with housing developments following it. Another that’s much like these is in St. Joseph County, along the Nottawa Prairie. In that case the flat land is not a river valley. But the effect is much the same. You ride along, slightly above the level of the prarie on the left, with the ground rising to gentle hills on the right. The early settlers built their homes just up on the higher ground, and that is where the homesteads are still located.

Here in the Little Raccoon Creek valley, a cemetery was on the higher ground to my left as I rode north. I couldn’t have asked for a better view of what I had come to see. What I was interested in was the road that goes off toward the creek in the distance. On the maps put out for the Bridge Festival (which are good bicycling maps, too) it’s called Pipeline Road. Delorme calls it County Road 21.

The above is a map snippet from the Raccoon Township map in the 1874 atlas. The arrow points to the road that is now called Pipeline Road. The line running from upper left to lower right is the Ten O’Clock Treaty line. The road is a place where that Treaty boundary has left a mark on the landscape.

Under the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne, the Native peoples ceded the land to the south of this line. Tecumseh used the signing of this treaty to bolster his cause, because it showed that what he and his brother had predicted was coming true. The Americans really were on their way to taking all the Indian land.

The writer of the 1880 history of Parke County tells what happened next:

…and so the Ten O’clock line was legally established. But Tecumseh angrily declared the line should never be run, and by his hostility the settlement of this county was delayed at least ten years. In July, 1810, he sent emissaries down the river to steal horses, and do other acts to provoke war; but after they passed the Montezuma village the Weas of Parke and Vigo sent warning to Harrison, and little damage was done. The following month Tecumseh met Harrison at Vincennes, and again vehemently declared that he would not allow the surveyors to run the line, or settlement to be made near it…

But of course, the line did eventually get run, and the Pipeline Road runs along a small piece of it.

This is a view along the last leg of the path from the paved road to the Maria Creek Baptist Church cemetery. (The road is one between Oaktown and Freelandville, Indiana.) The gravesite of Charles Polke is near the trees, left of center in the photo, where it would be hard to see at any distance if not for four steel fence posts set in the ground at the four corners. They are not visible in the photo, but can be seen as one gets closer.

Isaac McCoy was pastor here for eight years before going away to do missions to the Indians on Raccoon Creek in present-day Parke County, at the Carey Mission near Niles, Michigan, and in Kansas. He was in fact a person who while in Michigan was agitating the government to remove Indians to Kansas, which views happened to be agreeable to that same government, which happened to be funding his mission school. The Potawatomi people of southwest Michigan didn’t particularly like that aspect of McCoy’s activities when they found out about it. It cooled their relationship somewhat.

McCoy’s missionary ideas were controversial while he was pastor here at Maria Creek. There were anti-missionary Baptists who were opposed to mission boards and such activities as McCoy was starting to get into among the Indians. The present-day Primitive Baptist Church is descended from the anti-missionary baptists and gives its side of the story here.

The controversy is fairly complex, and I will not try to summarize it. Instead I’ll mention one aspect that it seems they were opposed to. Mission Boards tended to sponsor celebrity preachers who would make brief stops at congregations, trying to raise enthusiasm and money for their work. McCoy was one with these tendencies; another was John Mason Peck whose activities were mostly on the other side of the Wabash, in Illinois. In secular terms, we can say this was contrary to the democratic and egalitarian spirit of self-government that was present in the young United States.

There is a lot more to it than that, but I do not have the knowledge or resources to attempt a summary at this time. When I first learned about it, it seemed one of those internal squabbles within a religious group that would not be of interest to those on the outside. But I would now like to learn more, because it seems to be not so “internal” after all.

There is not much visible sign of it at this site, but it makes it a special place worthy of some care.

One of the routes north from Fort Harrison at present-day Terre Haute was probably along what is now the Rosedale Road, which is the road I took from Rosdale to Terre Haute. It was fine for riding. While doing it, I decided that I need to make a collection of all the specific accounts of War of 1812 soldiers who got a look at new parts of Indiana while on the march, and then came back to settle at the earliest opportunity. One such, up in Elkhart County, is one of my Black Hawk war scare sites.

Near the north end of Terre Haute there is a Fort Harrison drive. Delorme Street Atlas showed that Fort Harrison was near the west end of it, next to the Wabash River. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find when I got there. Would there be a historic park with visitor center? Or was it even marked?

When I got to the end of Fort Harrison road, I found nothing except no trespassing signs and a gated community. (I had ridden past a historical marker where it crosses Hwy 41.) I rode back to a house where a couple of guys had been in the yard, watching over some kids. One of them knew about Fort Harrison. He said I could just follow the gravel path and ignore the signs, or I could go in to the Elks Club. Fort Harrison was behind the dumpsters, he said, and it was pretty overgrown.

So that’s what I did, riding into the Elks Club property, past signs saying it was private property. There is nothing at all to welcome visitors to take a look at Fort Harrison, but if you know it’s there, you can find it.

At first I decided this would have to be the closest approximation to a reconstructed Fort Harrison. It’s the fence around the dumpsters, and it does have a no trespassing sign on it.

And there are markers. I’m not sure if these are on the Elks’ property, or in the backyard of the nearby homes. Like I said, there is nothing to guide and direct a visitor, but these aren’t very hard to find.

That wasn’t all. This structure was barely visible from the markers, but if you approached from a different angle, you could get up close. There had apparently been two of these pagoda structures at one time. The river is very close, in the background. But now all that’s left of the one is the foundation. The one above will probably be in the same state soon. Between the two there was a concrete boat landing ramp leading into the river, but it had obviously been a long time since it had been used for that.

Did there used to be a town park here before the Elks moved in? I don’t know.