The Spokesrider

We just got back from a three-day outing in east-central Indiana. I’m starting to feel like an old hand on Randolph County’s roads, even though I have ridden on only a small sample of the county’s bicycleable ones. But my rides are starting to cross old paths, like yesterday when I crossed the Twelve Mile [...]

(Aug 28, concluded.) The Arba cemetery lies behind the Friends church. The 1882 county history suggests that an Indian burial place was descecrated in order to make this cemetery, though it doesn’t say so in those words. The Randolph County Historical Society has a camcorder video that was taken through a windshield while driving into [...]

(Sep 28 2009, cont.) Arba, founded in 1815, was an important town in Randolph County during the settlement era, probably due to its location right next to Wayne County on the road leading north from Richmond. A lot of the settlers had made their homes in Wayne County for at least a short time before [...]

(Sep 28, cont.) From the Thomas W. Parker place I rode a mile east along the Randolph-Wayne county line to Arba Road. This was one of the main destinations for the day. It’s a place where the modern road still follows the old “Quaker Trace.” In Indiana the Quaker Trace connected Richmond with Fort Wayne, [...]

  (Sep. 28, cont.) At the southwest corner of Thomas W. Parker’s old property, i.e. at the intersection of the Greenville Treaty Line and the Randolph-Wayne county line, I stopped to look for places that the first settler might have picked for his home site. (My bicycle is just barely inside Wayne County. The county [...]

I had now reached the “old boundary,” i.e. the Greenville Treaty boundary. The road here follows that boundary line. Parker’s farm was on the left side of the road. The road that forms the Wayne County line can be seen in the distance here.

(Sep 28, cont) The road east comes to a T intersection here because it runs into the Greenville Treaty line. The surveys on the two sides of the line don’t match up, with the result that the east-west roads don’t go straight through.