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 here turns to the right (east) to follow the border.

googlemap

I had made a bad guess in coming to this border. I could have saved about five miles, including three miles into the ESE wind, if I had known that one of the other north-south roads was paved all the way to the border.

The soybean field in the photo is at the northwest corner of Section 11 in Fairview Township, Osceola County. The map above, where the site of the photo is shown by a red dot, is from the 1914 history of Osceola County, following page 556. The GLO land patent database has no records for Section 11 to tell us who first bought the land, but that’s probably because Section 11 wasn’t sold through the Land Office. The same county history says (page 556) “The northeastern portion of this township was unsettled for a number of years. It was held by speculators and the railroad company…” Presumably this means the land had been awarded by the national government to a railroad to help pay for the construction. Whether it was a piece of the railroad that once crossed a corner of Section 12, I don’t know.

Settlers often complained that railroads and land-grant colleges would hold on to their land, waiting for the sale value to go up. Since they weren’t doing anything to improve their land, this had a depressing effect on the local economy and on the value of the land taken by nearby settlers. I’m currently reading some Paul Wallace Gates articles about how these conflicts played out. I’m hoping for some new bicycle destinations from these articles, but it’s also interesting to learn how these conflicts may have involved places I have already ridden to.

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 for information about the original owners. I didn’t find anything to blog about, but the BLM’s land patent database told me that this land in Section 3 was purchased with military scrip warrants that had been issued to veterans of the War of 1812 (or to their heirs). It was all purchased at the Sioux City land office in the 1850s. The “authority” is listed as “March 3, 1855; ScripWarrant Act of 1855 (10 Stat. 701)”. Each land patent lists the name of the original veteran to whom the scrip was assigned, as well as the names of the persons who used it to purchase the land.

I’ve seen that sort of thing in the database for a lot of the land entries in this part of Iowa, so decided it was time to learn more about it. That eventually led me to a few resources that I’ll note here for future reference:

• A rootsweb genealogy page that contains some helpful summaries, including a few words about the Scrip Warrant Act of 1855.
• A paper by Paul Wallace Gates: “Charts of Public Land Sales and Entries” in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1964), pp. 22-28
• A book that I might purchase for myself: Hone, E. Wade. 1997. “Land & property research in the United States.” Salt Lake City, Utah: Ancestry.

I’ve recently been reading some other articles by Gates in an edited volume: Gates, Paul W., Allan G. Bogue, and Margaret Beattie Bogue. 1996. “The Jeffersonian dream : studies in the history of American land policy and development. Historians of the frontier and American West.” So it’s not surprising that his name would pop up in connection with this topic.

In the article he explains that the scrip was issued to veterans, who in turn sold it:

For the most part the veterans sold their right to warrant brokers who flourished on the purchase and sale of them. They were quoted daily in the New York papers, and large numbers were acquired by speculators for entering public land at prices as low as 50 cents an acre, although more commonly the warrants sold for 70 cents to $1.10.

There were times and places, such as Iowa in the 1850s, where it often was foolish to buy land from the government at the set price of $1.25/acre. Instead, one could purchase warrant scrip from a war veteran, usually through a broker and/or land speculator, and use that to purchase the land at a somewhat lower price than the usual $1.25/acre.

That seems to be how the land in the photo was purchased, though the details as to how much was paid by the first owner for the scrip are not known.

This road in Jackson Township, Shelby County, Ohio, follows the Greenville Treaty line to the east.

And here’s looking the other way, toward Fort Loramie. The Greenville Treaty of 1795 left lots of marks like this on the landscape. Most of them make excellent bicycle routes. They are quiet roads with little traffic. I stopped for several photos like this on my ride to Fort Loramie on August 30.

I’ve been looking for similar marks on the landscape in Iowa, in preparation for some riding there this summer. My wife is from Iowa, and it has been a few years since we’ve gone back for a visit. 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. (If you click on the map above, you’ll go to the web site from which I got it.)

I’ve visited quite a few treaty boundaries in Ohio and Indiana, and I see there are some in Illinois, too. There are county atlases for Michigan that show treaty boundaries, and I’ve also seen them marked on USGS maps for Michigan. But in Iowa, not a trace.

Some treaty boundaries were never surveyed, so those would not be expected to have left a trace. I don’t happen to know which Iowa boundaries, if any, were ever surveyed.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2009/02/08/no-treaty-lines-in-iowa/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2007/12/01/disconnecting-a-church-building-from-the-terrain/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2007/12/01/disconnecting-a-church-building-from-the-terrain/#comments Sun, 02 Dec 2007 03:17:39 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2007/12/01/disconnecting-a-church-building-from-the-terrain/ I was pleasantly surprised to see this youtube video when I was taking a look at the In The Agora blog.

I recognized right away what it was. It’s a church where some of my wife’s relatives were members. The only time I was there was in September 2005, when we went to Manning, Iowa for a family reunion. We knew at the time that the congregation was going to cease to exist as a separate entity, that the building was going to be moved to town, and that a video production was planned.

Some good photos of the church and of the move at on line at David Kusel’s web site (click on Trinity Lutheran Church) and at the Manning News. After the Sunday morning worship service, I took the opportunity to take a few of my own.

This is looking south from the church steps. The building across the street was at one time the parsonage. I like that rolling countryside a lot.

And here is a view to the southwest. The car with the bicycle rack is ours. Unfortunately, there was no bicycle on this trip. This would be a great place to ride. I’d probably get more of gravel roads than I usually care for, but the views would be worth it.

I may do history riding in Iowa next summer, but so far I don’t know how the Black Hawk story would take me here to Carroll and Audobon counties. I suppose it’s possible that the Sauk and Fox Indians did some hunting here, but more of what is known about the Sauk and Fox people in Iowa took place along the Des Moines and Raccoon rivers (as well as along the Mississippi).

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.

But I don’t get my way about everything. And this church building was in very good condition. If it had stayed here, there would have been no money for upkeep and it would have fallen into ruin. And even though it’s just a building and could be decommissioned, maybe it’s also good for us to have a sense of the sacred, and of sacred places that need to be treated with respect.

Maybe I value such a sense because it is hard for me to come by it. As a pastor’s kid, I was familiar, perhaps overly familiar, with many church interiors like this. I can’t say familiarity bred contempt in my case, but it may have bred casual carelessness. And now, maybe I’m in danger of confusing nostalgia with the sacred. This church with its altar and chancel is much like many other rural Lutheran churches I used to see. So in a way the visit here was like a visit back to my own childhood. I already blogged here about a similar church where I grew up.