I’ve already blogged some of this at The Reticulator.

The above is a slide from the very first Black Hawk talk I gave, almost 6 years ago. The bike trip on which the photo in the lower left was taken was a few years before that. The brick house was built by a man who served in the militia at the time of the Black Hawk war scare. Later in life, one of the most significant events of his life that he recalled for the local county history writer was that he had once seen George Washington. It had been at a distance, in 1797, when he was a very small boy.

John F. Schreder’s father had been a Hessian soldier in the Revolutionary War, had deserted, and then fought on the American side. John Jr. had served in the War of 1812, moved to Michigan in 1831, and was a member of a local militia company during the Black Hawk war.

The Lenawee county history published in 1879 said he had built a brick house. I went off on a bike ride (starting from Jackson) to see if it was still standing. When I got to the road where I expected to find it, I didn’t see any brick house where I expected it to be. I rode up and down the gravel road, then came back to this spot. There was an old-looking white house in the right place — the shape was that of an old house of that era — but it wasn’t a brick house.

I got off the bike so I could look more carefully. While I was staring at the houses, a pickup truck pulled up. The driver wanted to know what I was doing. He was a neighbor from the other side of the road. I explained briefly, telling him I was looking for a brick house. He pointed to the one I was looking at and said, “That’s a brick house.” He then took me behind it to meet the owner, an older man who was busy trying to get wood siding attached to it. Some of the brick was still visible from the back yard, so that’s where I took my photo.

The three of us talked for a while. At one point the owner mentioned he was related to the Col. Travis who was killed at the Alamo.

It would have been interesting to talk more, but it was getting late. Shadows were already getting long and I needed to ride to Adrian where Myra was expecting to meet me. I did make it before it was too dark to ride any more, but not by a lot.

I wished John F Schreder had had more to say about the Black Hawk war. At the time I found it somewhat amusing that one of the important events in the story of his life, as told to the county history compiler, was of his having seen George Washington. But the fact that he did is something worth knowing about Washington and about the Americans of his time.