The Spokesrider

I had always assumed Banfield Road was an old Indian trail, since it’s one that weaves gently back and forth instead of following section lines or a straight diagonal. However, I just now looked at Hinsdale’s 1931 atlas. No trail is shown there. I suspect the surveyors who did this part of Barry and Calhoun counties just didn’t do a good job of recording where their survey lines crossed the trails, because it looks like a lot of others are missing, too.

I took a day off from work today to go on a long bike ride, but ended up doing a short bike ride instead, and spending the afternoon working on the yard and house. Moral of the story: Never again should I trust wunderground.com. Use Accuweather instead. I was looking for a couple of settlement-era [...]

On Monday’s ride, I stopped to look at this milkweed plant along the border between Barry and Allegan counties. The field behind it looked prairie-like. Did Scales Prairie extend this far to the west? A modern map I use for riding shows the prairie, but doesn’t delineate its boundary. So tonight I worked at making [...]

This is another shot from Monday’s ride. It was starting to sprinkle just a bit — I got out the rain cover for my handlebar bag and stowed my electronics — but managed to ride ahead of what little rain there was. The farmers on the John Deere tractors kept cutting hay. This scene is [...]

This is the last photo I took on yesterday’s ride. It’s about 20 miles from home, just south of Charleton Park in Barry County, on Section 1 of Baltimore Township. Charleston Park Road is mostly an arrow-straight road that follows the section lines, but here it makes a gentle curve around the pond below this barn. The scene is an old favorite of mine.

The above list of land patent records at the Bureau of Land management’s web site appears to contain some Anishinaabe names. They are all in Section 1 of Thornapple Township, Barry County, Michigan, right on the border with Kent County. There are also a couple of such names in the neighboring section in Irving Township. [...]

Myra was cleaning out some things tonight and found a box of old photos from 1996. Many of them are hers but some are mine — photos whose whereabouts I had been wondering about for some time. This is one of them. Most of them are from the tour I did that year to all [...]