After no riding since mid-late November, the roads were finally good enough for me to get out for a couple of short rides this weekend.

This is on Banfield Road, north of Bedford, Michigan.

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.

Riding at this time of year reminds me that for several years I’ve wanted to do a lot more riding early in the year, before leaves are on the trees. There is a lot to be seen that will be hidden when the leaves come out. But it never seems to work that way. Springtime is our busiest time at work. Last year I did get out for a good ride on a cool day in mid-March, but ended up with a bit of pneumonia a few days later, which put a big dent in my springtime riding. I don’t know if the ride was a contributing factor, but this year I’m going avoid letting my body get cooled down as much as it did that time.

I rode to work and back today, too, but the sky wasn’t nice and clear like it was yesterday. 42.5 miles for the year so far.

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 history places in Johnstown Township in Barry County, which is the next township to the north of the one where I live. The ride was a little over 30 miles altogether.

One of the two places of interest was the north edge of Bristol Lake, where there had been a Potawatomi village in the early 1830s. More about that another time, but in this photo I’m looking south towards the north edge of the lake, which is up and over the far edge of the field with the hay bales.

I took several photos of chicory blossoms (the blue ones). At this site I saw a strong-flying Monarch butterfly checking out all the nearby milkweed plants. It wouldn’t stop and pose for a photo, but when I got home I was pleased to discover that one of my photos had captured it anyway.

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 a map of this part of Barry County. My progress so far is shown here. My bike route is shown in green. H marks the place I wrote about yesterday, where I stopped to take a photo of hay cutting.

I imported the pre-settlement vegetation data from the Michigan Natural Features Inventory that I’ve also used elsewhere so I could see the extent of the prairie. M marks the place where I took my photo, and yes, it looks like Scales Prairie extends over to the west edge of the township. The trees on the horizon in the photo seem to correspond with the non-prairie lobe that almost divides the prairie, shown to the right of the M.

But the people who made the map didn’t classify this place as prairie. Instead, they classified it as oak savanna. So it makes me wonder, were the people in Barry County so desperate to have prairie openings (which are more common in the counties to the south) that they decided to call their savanna a prairie? Or is there a deficiency in the algorithm that was used to classify the data for the MNFI?

The map does show a little prairie opening at B. That one is known as Bull’s Prairie. In that case the settlers’ definition of a prairie agrees with the MNFI classification.

I was also surprised to see that there was an area of oak savanna near the land that Anishinaabe people had bought from the government in the 1840s or 1850s (shown in yellow and marked A). I even rode through it. I do remember seeing one old farmhouse in a place that I didn’t expect to be good farmland. It was near the southeast corner of that savanna area.

Ah, yes, I even took a photo. Here it is. I don’t recall seeing much evidence of farming in the area. There were more residences than I had expected, though. I suppose the land along the Thornapple River is valuable waterfront.

Back to Scales Prairie. This disk was near the location marked D on the map. (I wish I had a camera with a GPS that would record the exact location of my photos. I’m not interested in using a GPS-based map system for finding my way. I like using paper maps, including old maps from the 19th century. In that sense I’m a low-tech kind of rider. But I wouldn’t mind using GPS technology to document where I’ve been.)

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 in section 8 of Irving Township, Barry County, Michigan. It’s not the best agricultural land. Much of it is part of the Middleville State Game Area.

Just a mile to the northwest some Odawa families had bought land from the government — 240 acres altogether. The Barry County history of 1880 had some comments about them, in the section about Irving Township. The remarks are — well, let’s just say they go beyond even some of the common prejudices of the time:

Until 1848 settlements in Irving were confined almost entirely to the vicinity of the southern town-line, while north of Peter Cobb’s the township had not been penetrated by the pioneer in any direction. About the year named there was a small colony of Indian farmers on section 6, where they had purchased government land and set about improving and cultivating it. Their attempts, like similar attempts by other redskins in other townships, resulted in the overwhelming conviction that whatever the noble red man might be fitted for he was assuredly not fitted to be a farmer, so after brief and disastrous experiments they gave up the task and returned to a nomadic and more congenial state of existence.

A few comments about this:

As for the idea that Indians were not fit to be farmers, it ignores the fact that Indians in much of North America had been farmers for many generations. Military expeditions against Indians in Ohio and Indiana in the 1790s and during the War of 1812 commonly encountered large fields of corn near villages — sometimes hundreds of acres producing tens of thousands of bushels — which they took the time to destroy. (To those who say William Tecumseh Sherman waged a new kind of warfare when he targeted civilian property in the south, one has to say: Nonsense. That’s the kind of war that had been waged against Indians for many decades.)

It is true that most Native Americans had trouble adopting the European-American methods of agriculture. There were some cultural differences that made it difficult, including family values that made it more important to help out relatives than accumulate capital and pay taxes. Whether those differences were a factor here in Irving Township, I don’t know. But the land soon came to be owned by non-Anishinaabe people.

Another point is that this was not prime farmland for anyone. As the writer said, this part of the township wasn’t settled until after 1848. Just a few miles south it was different. Down there were prairie patches and oak savannas that made good cropland. The Odawa families that bought land on section 6 chose that land because they were trying to keep out of the way of the land most coveted by white settlers. That was a big handicap, right from the beginning.

They had practiced swidden farming, which is not quite as settled a mode of farming as the white settlers followed. But it was not nomadic. If these Odawa people seemed nomadic at all, it was because they kept trying to move out of the way.

It may well be that not a single one of the 240 acres is being farmed now. Monday afternoon, about all I saw anywhere nearby was some haymaking.

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.

Just for fun, I looked in the GLO land patent database to see who the original purchaser was, and then searched for the name in the county histories. In the 1895 atlas (from which the image below was taken) the farmstead is shown as being owned by a C.S. Crittenden. But the original purchaser was Dayton Hall. He bought the land at the Kalamazoo land office, apparently in the 1850s, which is well after most of southern Michigan was settled.

Did I find any interesting anecdotes about Dayton Hall? No, not really. All I found, other than the fact that he was the first buyer of this land, was that he served as one of the two elected highway commissioners in 1852. Did he have an interest in getting a road to go conveniently past his new farm? Hard to say, but in this case having the road follow the section line, instead, would not be an easy construction project even now.

From the looks of the old map, the road didn’t used to make such a gentle, sweeping curve on the south. It was more like a right-angle turn in the old days. I’ve marked the approximate path of the current road in red.

According to my UniversalMap, that road that goes to the west on the south side of the farmstead is one that still exists, as a gravel road. I’ve never noticed it. One gets up a little speed riding down around this little curve. Maybe I’ve always enjoyed the place too much to even notice that gravel side road.

It looks like there used to be a school a half mile west. Someday I’ll have to take ride back there and take a look to see if there is still an old school building. If so, it would likely be one that’s now a residence.

(The map image is provided courtesy of www.HistoricMapWorks.com. You can click on the map to go to the page from which it was taken.)

A little ways south of that barn, perhaps on one of the places identified as belonging to an Ikes in 1895, there is an old dairy farm close to the road. I used to enjoy riding past it. In the mid 1990s, it had that silage smell characteristic of a dairy farm, and sometimes there would be school-age boys helping with farm chores. That has been a rare sight for a long time, given how the farm population of the U.S. has been aging. But it has been a long time since the place had the appearance of a two-generation family operation. I imagine those boys are grown up and living away from their old home now. And there is no longer even the smell of a dairy farm.

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. They are all 40-acre parcels, comprising the northeast quarter of section 1 in Thornapple, and an adjacent 80 acres in Irving.

I don’t know anything about these particular people. I wonder if one of the names means something like “big hunter.” The others don’t mean anything that I can recognize.

I was curious as to what sort of land that was. One of the Odawa strategies to avoid eviction from Michigan, as had happened to their Potawatomi neighbors, was to stay out of the way and not own any of the land the white settlers most wanted. (This is a point made in James McClurken’s PhD thesis on the subject.)

So what kind of place was it that these people had purchased. Today I played hookey from work and went on a 105 mile bike ride to look. It wouldn’t really have required that much riding, but I also wanted to do a 100 mile ride. It has been 3 or 4 years since I did one.

This road leads into the quarter-section from the north. Apparently there are some homes further back. In fact, the entire area seems to be turning into a bedroom community for Grand Rapids.

The road is a private one, so I didn’t ride any further onto it.

And this is as close as I was able to approach from the south. It’s still a quarter-mile away from the land in question.

So it’s nothing particularly exciting. But I had a nice bike ride just the same. I’m now up to 1076 miles for the year. I’d rather be at about 1800 by now, in order to make my goal for the year, but it’s typical that I’m still behind at this time of year.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/06/24/a-corner-of-thornapple-township/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/04/30/portable-tire-pump/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/04/30/portable-tire-pump/#comments Thu, 01 May 2008 03:13:42 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2008/04/30/portable-tire-pump/

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 the towns in the Midwest League (Class “A” Minor League baseball). I had thought a ride like that might be an endurance challenge, so did about 2000 miles of “training” rides beforehand. (It turned out not to be much of an endurance challenge at all. There are no stories of agony and victory to tell about.)

It was while doing my training that I decided I needed a new bike, a real touring bike instead of the hybrid (cross) bike I had used for my first-ever tour the year before. This bike may have had something to do with why the tour was so much easier than I had expected.

I got my bike from Billy’s Bike Shop in Galesburg, but then somehow didn’t have a compact tire pump to handle Presta valves. My old bike had Schrader valves. I didn’t feel safe going out for a long ride without a tire pump. I had bought a big floor pump at Billy’s, so just strapped that on my rear rack and went out for a ride to Prairieville. It looked kind of strange, and drew comments from a co-worker who later said he had seen me out riding that day. But I got in a couple rides that way while getting used to my new bike. I didn’t need to use the pump.

The photo was taken on Floria Road, between Hickory Corners and Delton. The mileage spreadsheet I’ve kept says the date was 8-Jun-1996, and that it was a ride of 41 miles.

Up ahead at the stop sign there is a very slight jog in the road.   It’s where Osborne Road in Barry county crosses Manning Lake Road.  Manning Lake Road forms the boundary between Barry and Johnstown townships.

Whenever I’m traveling on an east-west county road in Michigan and I come to a slight jog in the road at an intersection, I check to see if I’m at a township boundary.  Usually that’s what it is.  It’s where the original land surveys didn’t quite match up.    I’m not sure why such a small jog was allowed to stand, because at least some of the surveyor instructions called for surveyors to force them to match at township boundaries when the discrepancy was small.   Larger discrepancies were allowed to stand.

The original division of Barry Township into square mile sections was done by surveyor Sylvester Sibley.  Johnstown  Township, on the other side of the intersection, was done by Musgrove Evans, as were a few other townships further to the east.

Evans is a well known character in the history of Lenawee County.  He was one of the very first settlers, and there is a historical marker in front of his house, which still stands in Tecumseh.    In 1825 he did the survey of the Chicago Road, which before that was the Sauk Trail, and now is US-12.   In 1834 he and his family moved to Texas, where he did more surveying.   His son, Samuel, was killed at the Alamo in 1836.   Evans was a Quaker, as were many other settlers in Lenawee County.  But after the Alamo and his son’s death, he got involved in the fighting himself and has been listed as one of the “heroes” of the Battle of San Jacinto.

His surveying tools eventually found their way back to Michigan, I believe in the 1960s or thereabouts.    I saw them ten years ago at a museum in Tecumseh, and they have also been on display at the Michigan Historical Center in Lansing.  I’m not sure if that’s where they are now.

So he is an interesting character in local Michigan history.  But among Barry County surveyors, his name is not one that is honored.  I have been told, by a surveyor who shall remain anonymous, that his work here was almost fraudulent.  It wasn’t actually a fraud, because he did go over the ground and he put stakes in the ground.  But how he located his corners is something that mystifies the local surveyors.   Evans’ work still causes them difficulties to this day.

I would be reluctant to say, though, that his work had anything to do with the two section lines not matching up at the photo in the intersection.  I was under the impression that the discrepancies due to his work were a lot larger than that.

The source for some of the biographical information about Evans is Norman C. Caldwell’s,  “Surveyors of the Public Lands in Michigan 1806-2000″ (2001).

Whoever would have thought Banfield would get yuppified? What you see in this photo is most of the little village. Usually I see it riding from the south on Banfield Road (from the right, in the photo). But early yesterday evening, I came to it from the west. It had never looked this pretty before. When we first bought a house in Michigan in 1979, we had thought of buying a small, old house next to where I stopped my bicycle. The whole place, including the house, was rather run-down then, and has been until recently. But now there is a fresh new asphalt parking lot in front of the old Greek Revival church building. And the owners of the general store have been investing some money in their place, too. If it were a little farther from home, it might now be a good place to stop for a breather and a bite to eat. Next time I may go inside to see what they’ve done with the place.

On a late Sunday afternoon bike ride I rode along much of Osborne Road in Barry County. Much of the road is gravel, and I spent a lot of time looking down, watching for patches of loose gravel. I almost ran over this snake coiled up, but with my trifocals wasn’t even sure that’s what it was. I stopped and walked back with my camera. Sure enough, there was a little snake, maybe a foot long at the most. It wasn’t apathetic about my moving in for photos. It didn’t play possum like a hognose snake.

So what is it? A baby fox snake? A Kirtland snake? I found this page that lists Michigan’s 18 native species of snake. I sure can’t identify it just by picture matching. Here is a page about the western fox snake in Iowa. It suggests that a young snake should be lighter colored than the one I saw. And here is one about the Kirtland snake. It talks about a checkerboard pattern, which this snake has. And the size is right. But it also says the Kirtland snake is rarely seen above ground. Well, I’ve only seen this one, so can’t say whether it was a rare occurrence or not.

It was a nice warm day, in the high 60s. I suppose the road was nice for sunning. But the snake didn’t seem to care to have me around.

Another reason I stopped at that place was to get a photo of this old barn along the road.