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 miles of gravel to get across the river.

At the point where the gravel began was a sign: “Northwest Ohio Rivers Council Memorial Trail.” I didn’t know what the Northwest Ohio Rivers Council was and that high wheeler bike didn’t seem like the right thing for gravel, but it was a good sign, just the same.

A couple miles later I was back on pavement. I was surprised to find that Evansport is more than just a crossroads.

I have since learned that I’m not the only one who needed to learn that. The following is from a “Stryker Area Heritage Council” web site:

In 1983, two Northwest State Community College researchers included Evansport on a list of northwest Ohio ghost towns, catching the village’s 300 residents completely unaware of their own demise.

As proof that the unincorporated Tiffin Township village is still very much alive and well, the Evansport Terquasquicentennial Committee has met monthly for the last year to plan events to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Evansport’s founding in 2010.
Choosing “Ghost Town Alive at 175” as its theme, the committee—composed of area residents and Stryker Area Heritage Council members—has published a brochure on Evansport’s history that is available on the SAHC website (see the bottom of this page), www.strykerahc.org, along with other Evansport historical information and vintage photographs. Committee members hope to publish a more detailed community history this year.

The anniversary celebration is scheduled for late June.

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Here’s Evansport on the GoogleMap of the day’s ride.

There were more of the signs on the road south along the river. Here is a link to a Bryan Newspaper issue from 1993 in which a page 3 article tells about the dedication of the trail. It explains the high-wheeler, too.

Yesterday’s ride: 33 miles. Today’s ride: 66 miles. (I’ll post photos later.) YTD mileage: 943

This Roman Catholic church building is a sign of Junction’s grandeur in the canal days.

But times have changed. Services are now held on Friday and Saturday instead of Sunday. And alcohol is no longer served.

In looking for more information about the church, I learned about the Ohio Memory web site at www.ohiomemory.org In it you can search the Defiance Public Library for “junction church” and find photos of a First Communion in 1911 that had 50 children posing outside. That was also the 50th anniversary of the church.

There is also much more to be found on that site, such as photos of canals when they were still in operation.

Here is one taken in 1917 after they ceased functioning. There had been a bridge over one in Defiance (which is not so far from Junction). The bridge was being torn down and the canal was then filled in.

827.0 miles YTD

This arch is off to the side of the road, only a third of a mile south of the actual junction in Junction, Ohio. I wondered if it had once carried the canal across the creek, aquaduct style. After all, the canal needed some way to cross the creeks without getting wet.

The answer is “yes”, according to the plat map. The creek is identified as Six Mile Creek, and the description says it’s a stone arch culvert of “dia 30″, which I presume means 30 somethings in diameter. I don’t know what units those could be, though.

This PDF brochure at the Ohio DNR web tells about a stone aquaduct across Six Mile Creek. However, that one is a different arch and a different Six Mile Creek some distance to the south — six miles southwest of Fort Amanda, where I ended the day’s ride. I’ll be taking a copy of that brochure with me next time I go riding in the area.

YTD 810.0 miles

In Junction there was a new historical marker that hadn’t been there ten years ago on my previous ride through. It marks the intersection of the Miami-Erie and Wabash-Erie canals. The two canals joined together at this location, hence the name of a community, Junction, that grew up around it.

I greatly approve of the marker, because it is as close as possible to the site it commemorates. The ditch on the other side of the Ohio historical marker is what remains of the Miami-Erie canal bed. It’s not quite as clear exactly where the Wabash-Erie canal ran. Some maps show the canal bed as coinciding with the modern road that can be seen to the left; others show it as the ditch on this side of the road.

Either way, this is about as close to the actual water intersection as the marker could have been placed.

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Late edit:  This googlemap shows a pretty big, canal-sized ditch joining the north-south one from the east.    So that would suggest the old Wabash-Erie canal bed is the ditch next to the road.

I spent the rest of the day picking stickery weed pods off my clothes, but it was worth climbing through them to get a closer look. The structure certainly did look like a canal lock, especially with the vertical grooves where the pivot side of the lock-gates would have fit. You can see a bit of one at the bottom center of the photo.

Unlike the locks I had seen two years ago at Lockington, these structures are made of concrete, not stone. And the channel seems narrower. I wonder if it’s just an optical illusion, or if those big canal boats on which tourists can get rides would really have been able to pass through this lock.

This is one of those boats. It’s at Grand Rapids, on the Maumee River near Toledo. And there are at least a couple other such tourist canal boats in Ohio. It’s hard to say for sure whether they would have fit.

After returning home I looked for information about the lock I had found. The Ohio DNR has a web site about Canal Lands, and on it are plat maps that were made by surveyors in the 1890-1915 time period. Some of the surveyors were kind enough to mark where the canal crossed section lines, and to identify those sections. From those I was able to find the one for this section of Paulding County. The above snippet shows my lock, which is identified as Lock No. 21.

I had been curious about the location on the Oquanoxa reservation boundary. Did that have anything to do with the choice of location I wondered? Were the lands on the reservation side easier to obtain by condemnation proceedings, or whatever proceedings were used to obtain the canal lands? Judging by the plat map, the answer is no. The old treaty line, as shown by the boundary between the Durfey and Brandenberry properties, cuts right through the middle of the lock. (I’ve marked a portion of the treaty line in blue.)

There are a lot of great ways to waste time with those plat maps. One of them was to go up and down the canal to find Locks 20 and 22. I was curious as to how far apart those locks were in such flat, level country as this.

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The locations of Locks 20-22 are shown by blue markers on this Google Map. Lock 21 is in the center. Lock 20 is further 6.8 miles further north (as the canal flowed) between Junction and Defiance. Lock 22 is 8.5 miles further south. If you zoom all the way in and switch to satellite view, you see that the Lock 21 location is the only one of the three that still shows an unambiguous lock-like structure.

Here’s a parting photo of Lock 21, showing two sets of grooves for the lock gates. Unfortunately the one groove is somewhat obscured by the shadow of a small tree. But I like this photo anyway because it helps me see what kind of land this canal has passed through. My bicycle was behind me, on the edge of level, open farm fields. The canal channel is overgrown with trees and brush, but on the other side is more open space.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/22/lock-no-21/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/21/not-everything-has-been-obliterated/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/21/not-everything-has-been-obliterated/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 05:09:57 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/21/not-everything-has-been-obliterated/

This is what I had come to see: the boundary of Oquanoxa’s reservation. There is still a mark on the landscape — a field boundary which may or may not still be a property boundary. It’s in a slightly unusual location if you consider that the usual practice is to divide 640-acre sections into 160, 80, and 40 acre parcels, which results in boundaries at half-, quarter-, and eight-mile points along the roads. This one is positioned slightly differently, and fits the location of the reservation boundary as shown on old plat maps. I presume the fact that a drainage ditch follows the boundary will help it to persist for some time to come; otherwise, a farmer might just consolidate the two fields on each side of the line into one large one. (The reservation was the land on the left (south) side of the ditch.)

This is a view of the deflection in the road, looking north from the reservation, the direction from which I had come.

I was about to get back on my bicycle when I took a look on the wooded side of the road. There was a mass of concrete — an old, overgrown concrete ruin. Could it possibly be a canal lock?

I did have canals on my mind. A few miles back I had stopped at Junction, where the Wabash-Erie canal and the Miami-Ohio canal had once joined. I had noted the larger ditch on the west side of the road in some places along the way, and wondered if it was the remnant of the old canal. (If I had zoomed in on the Google Maps of the area, I would not have had any doubt.)

I had been thinking about canals, but I had not expected to encounter an old structure out in the middle of nowhere, especially when “nowhere” was on an old Indian boundary line. I looked for a way to get in for a closer look.

YTD: 801.5 miles

There are no modern roads that follow the boundary of Oquanoxa’s reservation, but there are a few places where it is still marked by property lines and field boundaries that can be seen from satellite photography.

My intention was to stop at a few locations where public roads intersect these visible boundaries.

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The first was near the northwest corner of the boundary where there happened to be a little deflection in the road. While planning the route I didn’t think much more of that deflection than as a handy place to help me find the location without having to watch my bicycle odometer too closely.

I almost decided to skip it. When I got to the last crossroad north of the boundary, the pavement ended. A sign said “Road closed when wet.” I suppose a person on a mountain bike wouldn’t hesitate, but I did. It had rained the day before. Did that count as wet? I rode west to township road 151, but that didn’t look any better. So I returned to 163 to give it a try.

It was soft in places — in a few places it almost brought me to a standstill — but I managed to keep going.

When I got to that deflection in the road that I had seen on Google Map, I stopped to get photos. I didn’t realize it yet, but this stop was going to be the high point of the ride. (High in a manner of speaking, that is. This is very flat country — all part of an ancient Lake Erie lakebed.)

YTD mileage: 784.5

The beginning and end of last Sunday’s ride (Bryan and Fort Amanda) were places I had ridden to in previous years. In between was a completely new destination: Oquanoxa’s Reservation in Paulding County, OH.

The marker in the park at Charloe says: “Charloe — Site of the Oquanoxa’s Indian Reservation Before 1820.” It was good to see a marker to commemorate Oquanoxa and his people, but I wasn’t so sure where that 1820 date came from. I had thought Oquanoxa had been induced to leave around 1832.

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The reservation was a square parcel, three miles on a side. Charloe is in the middle, near the river. (If you zoom in on the Googlemap, you won’t see any community with that name. It’s a very small place. However, the Charloe Community Park is shown.)

The Royce Map shows that the village was actually located at the southeast corner of the reserve, not in the center where the monument is located.

When I got home I looked up the treaty documents again. Yes, I had remembered correctly. Article 1 of an 1831 Treaty with the Ottawa says:

The band of Ottoway Indians, residing on Blanchard’s fork of the great Auglaize river, and at Oquanoxa’s village on the Little Auglaize river, in consideration of the stipulations herein made on the part of the United States, do forever cede, release and quit claim to the United States, the lands reserved to them by the last clause of the sixth article of the treaty made at the foot of the Rapids of the Miami of the Lake on the 29th of September, 1817; which clause is in the following words: “There shall be reserved for the use of the Ottoway Indians, but not granted to them, a tract of land on Blanchard’s fork of the Great Auglaize river, to contain five miles square, the center of which tract is to be where the old trace crosses the said fork; and one other tract, to contain three miles square on the Little Auglaize river, to include Oquanoxa’s village,” making in said cession twenty-one thousand seven hundred and sixty acres.

I suspect the people who put up that monument copied that 1820 date from one of the local histories, perhaps “A history of Northwest Ohio : a narrative of its historic progress…” by Nevin Otto Winter (1917). On page 529 it says:

The largest Indian village ever located within the county was that of Charloe, which was situated on a beautiful site upon the left bank of the Auglaize. It was near the center of an Indian reserve of four miles square which was known as Oquanoxa’s reserve. Here dwelt the chieftain of that name with several hundred Indians who were a portion of the Ottawa tribe. The reservation was sold in 1820 when the chief and his followers took up their line of march toward the retiring sun.

So that makes maybe three things it got wrong: The date of the eviction of the Ottawa people from this reserve, the size of the reserve, and perhaps the site of the village, too. I would not rely completely on the Royce Map for the location of the village, though. And even if it is correct, there could perhaps have been a village at the site of Charloe at some time, too. “Took up their line of march,” is probably a euphemism for what actually happened, if the story of these Ottawa people is like that of the others who were forced to leave the Great Lakes region.

While studying the text of the treaty, another item jumped out. One of the signatories was “Nau-qua-ga-sheek”. That’s a name I recognize. It’s Noonday, or Nawehquageezhik, as it is spelled on the gravestone a few miles from my workplace. I blogged a little bit about him in an article titled, “Theology of the Grave.” A photo of his gravestone (which is also the gravestone of his wife, Somonoque) is here.

At first I wondered if it could be the same Noonday. But there is no good reason to think it isn’t. It isn’t likely the Ottawa people would have used the same name for two different people, at least not if the Michigan Ottawa were in contact with the ones in Ohio. And it wasn’t uncommon for Michigan Anishinabe leaders to come to Ohio and central Indiana for treaty meetings. In fact, it got to be a sore point with the Shawnee and Miami people whose lands were at stake.

Noonday seems to have gotten some special treatment in the treaty. At the very end there is Article 20, which states:

It is agreed that there shall be allowed to Nau-on-quai-que-zhick, one hundred dollars, out of the surplus fund accruing from the sales of the lands herein ceded, in consequence of his not owing any debts, and having his land sold, to pay the debts of his brethren.

Is it possible that Noonday would have gotten one hundred dollars out of the sale of land where he didn’t live? I think so, even though it says “…having his land sold…” Lots of “strange” things happened at these treaties to get people to sign. Noonday was less pliable than some Native leaders, but he didn’t speak English, so one shouldn’t be certain that he was aware of the exact wording or its meaning.

With Noonday on my mind, I jumped at a chance for Myra to drop me off with my bicycle when she went to Grand Rapids on Saturday. Noonday had a village there in the 1820s. That’s probably where he was still living at the time of that 1831 treaty meeting. His village was a little further ahead on the Grand River, perhaps half a mile beyond the blue bridge. A statue in his honor is soon going to be placed near the blue bridge, according to a December 15 news article.

I spent some time in this area, near the Gerald Ford presidential museum, taking photos of other sites associated with Noonday, and then rode home, getting there after sundown. I got a 69 mile ride out of it, which is probably the most miles I’ve ever made out of a trip between home and Grand Rapids.

YTD mileage: 776.0

In Michigan barns are red. In Ohio barns are white. I’ve heard from others who have made that same observation independently.

So on Sunday’s ride I was somewhat chagrined to see so many red barns in Ohio, at many points between Bryan and Fort Amanda. The above is one in Williams County.

This one is on the other side of the same road, in Defiance County.

But there were white barns, too. This is Ohio, after all. The one shown here is on the Defiance Trail near the Auglaize River in Allen County. (Shadows were long. It was getting late in the day. In addition to running low on daylight I had been running low on energy and strength in this part of the ride.)

I presume the Defiance Trail is the descendant of the 1812 military road between Fort Amanda and Fort Jennings, which is part of the military route to Fort Winchester, which was located at the present-day town of Defiance, which is located where the Auglaize River flows into the Maumee.

]]> http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/13/red-state-white-state/feed/ 0 http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/13/william-schillingers-diary/ http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/13/william-schillingers-diary/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 06:30:10 +0000 Spokesrider http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/05/13/william-schillingers-diary/

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 saw this monument back towards the river. So I turned back, walked again to the far corner of the cemetery, and took the path that leads down and across the ravine. Upon coming up out of the ravine one sees this view of the monument.

Many of the web sites about Fort Amanda tell about a journal that was kept by Ensign William Schillinger, who was stationed here during part of the War of 1812. I finally, just now, figured out where it was published. It’s in the Volume 41 of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Publications, published in 1932. That is not a volume that is online anywhere, so it will have to wait until I can read a library copy.

What I’m really looking for is any information about William Schillinger’s life in case it will lead to more ride destinations. From census records it looks like a few generations of William Schillingers lived in Cincinnati. If that’s the guy, it doesn’t sound so promising. I don’t usually go for urban destinations unless there is a really excellent story to go with them.

While looking for this I learned of another resource that looks promising: “Early Midwestern travel narratives: an annotated bibliography, 1634-1850″ by Robert R. Hubach, first published in 1961 and then re-published in 1998. (Google Books says it contains an entry for William Schillinger’s diary.) Alibris had an inexpensive copy that should be on its way to me shortly.

YTD mileage: 698.5