The Spokesrider

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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.

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.