More from the May 9 ride to Fort Amanda. Early in the ride I had my eye on a little dot on the map named Evansport, on the Tiffin River. I didn’t know if anything was left of the town, but I thought it worth a look even if I had to take a couple [...]
You can’t see this monument from the cemetery at Fort Amanda, at least not when leaves are on the trees. When I was there in 2007 I spent some time looking around in the cemetery, then took off figuring I had seen everything there was to see. But from the road that heads south I [...]
Even though I’m crediting myself with a long ride, this one was almost like cheating. The country is very flat and the wind was more or less at my back for over 90 percent of the miles. Even near the rivers there was little that could be called hilly. For much of the ride I followed an old canal route — one that didn’t have much need of locks in this kind of country. However, my best find of the whole ride was an old canal lock in an unexpected, unmarked location.
In re-reading some of the history of Shelby County, I came to realize I should not have been surprised by the sequence of Issue Dates on the land patents. This part of Shelby County, just north of the Greenville Treaty Line, was not settled until the 1830s. Settlement proceeded mostly from the south to the north, and this was north — about the last part of Shelby county to be settled.
In a way that seems strange. Settlement of southern Michigan was well underway by that time — the very best lands were already taken, and there was a fairly sizeable population by the time the Black Hawk war broke out in 1832. Much of Ohio had been settled a generation earlier. Not far from here were places that already had settlers by the time of the War of 1812. But this part of Ohio around Wapakoneta did not get settled until the 1830s — relatively late in Ohio settlement history.
After having done a late ride to this site the evening before, I rode here again the next morning. It was a bit out of my way and added extra miles for the ride to Piqua. I sort of regretted this detour by the end of the day. But it worked out OK in the [...]
Freyburg, OH has a big German catholic cemetery. I was looking for an excuse to post the photos I took of it on my August 29 starter ride, but haven’t found any good connections to the settlement-era stories, other than to note that this place was part of the Wapakoneta Reservation before 1832. This is [...]
After my starter ride on August 29, I went back to the same spot the next morning, as the first stop on a ride to Piqua. The driveway shown in this photo is part of the old boundary of the Wapakoneta reserve. The land on the far side was in the reserve, which existed from [...]