The Spokesrider

I had convinced myself that Dutch Settlement Road in Cass County was named for all the settlers of Dutch ancestry who settled in the area around Cassopolis and LaGrange.   But Ron Swartz thinks it was named for the German settlers who settled in the area where the road crosses the line to St. Joseph County.  [...]

In the last post there is an October 3 2011 2010 photo of Nicholsville, taken from the south.   This is the view upon approaching the village from the north. And here is one from downtown Nicholsville. According to the 1882 county history, Nicholasville, which contains a population of about one hundred, possessed two stores, a [...]

The Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin (which we visited week before last) is now a museum and a reminder of British oppression of Irish people.  The leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed here, though not in this courtyard. Executions by firing squad took place in this yard. This place isn’t exactly a part of [...]

This was taken today, on a Sunday afternoon ride to Little Prairie Ronde in Cass County, Michigan. I would have liked to stop at Charleston, but there wasn’t time, as it was almost sundown. But what’s left of Charleston can be seen in the distance. It’s a cemetery surrounded by trees, to the left of [...]

Earlier I had said that Dutch Settlement Road is the east-west road that runs through Volinia. That was a mistake that cost me several minutes at the Cass County history library yesterday, when I was trying to find a cemetery on Google Maps. Only when I realized that the road through Volinia is Marcellus Road, [...]

…it was one of many cemeteries in the vicinity of LaGrange Prairie. The area had produced a relatively large militia company at the time of the Black Hawk war. Sure enough, I found the graves of some of the men and their families here, including one of the Tietsorts.

This is another house near the one where my son was staying in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. No, that’s not a toy backhoe in front of the house. It looks small because the house is so large. At one of the visitor centers we found a book that told about some of [...]