The Spokesrider

I didn’t have any history destinations in mind for last week’s long bike ride, other than The Banks of Plum Creek at the end. But now that I’m home I like to learn what I can about some of the places where I took photos. This one is at the border with Minnesota. The road [...]

In the last post I told how my Tuesday ride ended in a thunderstorm. This scene of pasture land was toward the beginning of the same ride, about 16 miles from where I started in Spencer, Iowa. It’s in Section 3 of Waterford Township, Clay County. Tonight I looked at plat maps and county histories [...]

I’ve started to mark my maps with places in Iowa where we can say, “Black Hawk Slept Here.” But so far I have not found a single place where property lines or highways seem to follow one of the old treaty boundaries. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any such places, but the county atlases I’ve looked at so far give no sign of any.

It’s a shame the building had to be moved. For historical purposes, I don’t much like it when buildings are moved. To me, much of what’s interesting about them relates to the terrain and other surroundings. In this case it’s a rural, agricultural countryside that is now depopulated. If the building could have stayed where it was, it could be used to illustrate an important era in our country’s history that has come and gone.

If an old country school gets sold to a private party, gets vinyl siding and a greenhouse addition, I say it connects the present to the past more than if the building is moved to a park and turned into a museum.