Most of the buildings along Hawpatch Road are neat and Amish white. But there are a couple of derelict buildings. One is a church. The other is this old school. At least I presume it was a school.

There is also a newer-looking Amish school down the road. This derelict looks like it never was an Amish building.

According to “An Amish Patchwork : Indiana’s Old Orders in the Modern World,” by Meyers and Nolt (2005), the Amish settlement in LaGrange county dates to 1841, 9 years after the Black Hawk war. But I presume this building goes back to a time when this part of the county did not have the Amish as a majority population.

More from my May 17 ride to Moscow.

Almost any excuse will do for a stop along the way. This old schoolhouse in Albion Township caught my attention. It doesn’t seem to have been converted into a residence, like so many old one-room schools have.

But do the two front doors mean this was a two-room school? It’s not as large a building as the two-room school I attended in rural Nebraska. I’ll call it a one-room school.

This schoolyard still has the frame from a swingset and teeter-totter. That’s not something one sees very often. But judging by the grass growing in the yard, it hasn’t been used as a playground for a long time.

It doesn’t seem to be a museum, either, but somebody has kept it nicely painted.

I wasted some time looking for information about it in the county histories, but didn’t find any. Its location is shown on the 1873 county atlas, though. I’ve circled the location in red. My route for the day is also shown in red. The roads are all ones I had never been on before, even though it’s in my home county.

I got to thinking that for my bicycle rides, I often look for maps a lot older than that.

Sunday afternoon’s ride was guided in part by an 1873 atlas of Eaton County, Michigan. The part I was interested in — the northeast part of Hamlin Township, is shown above. (The atlas is online at Michigan County Histories and Atlases.)

When I saw from the map that in 1873 John Montgomery (or a like-named son) still owned some of the prairie he had settled on, and when I learned that he was still alive in 1880, I figured there was a good chance that house still existed. It does, and that’s the one I wrote about yesterday.

The location is circled in red on the above map. I had to get that map out as I rode east along the street. There were several old houses amongst the newer ones, which probably correspond to the other residences marked on that map, and I had to use the map to remind myself that Montgomery’s was very close to the county line.

I wondered if there was still a school at the location kitty-corner across the street from Montgomery’s residence. As shown above, a school-like building is still there, now nicely converted into a residence.

The east-west street leading back into town is busier now than it was in John Montgomery’s day. I’ve ridden there before when it was -very- busy. But once you get into the city limits of Eaton Rapids, there is a marked bike lane.

I had an event like that about 11 years ago, when I read Roy Meyers book, “History of the Santee Sioux : United States Indian Policy on Trial.” There are other books that could have done it, too, but that happens to be the one I read after my 1996 bike tour when I got drawn into the story of the Black Hawk war and all the issues around it.

Before I read that book I thought I knew a few things about Native American issues. Then I found out my ideas had already been tried and had been found wanting. I might get around to explaining more of the implications of all that in my political blog, The Reticulator. Here I’ll stick to bicycling and history.

My freshman year in high school was at a school on the edge of the Santee Sioux reservation in northeastern Nebraska. It was also near where I started my first-ever, multi-day bicycle tour. This was in 1995, before I read Meyers book.

I had been trying for some time to get my wife interested in bicycle touring. Finally she suggested that I should just go, and she would drive the van. She even suggested a route — I should visit my boyhood homes, and end up where my parents live now. That was a great suggestion.

I don’t know where all my photos from that trip are, but I found some that my wife had taken.

Here we are, off on that first multi-day tour. I’m riding the hybrid-style bike that I used that first year, and my youngest son is following behind, going along with me on my nostalgia trip. This is Winnetoon, Nebraska — which is actually about three miles from where we had lived. Back in the late 50s and early 60s it still had a grocery store, and on Saturday nights the city fathers would set up a movie projector outdoors for community entertainment — like had been done in many other small midwest towns in decades earlier than that.

These photos were taken a few hours before we began the ride. In the background is Christ Lutheran Church, where my father was pastor. We are standing in the schoolyard of what had been the District No. 3 school. I had posted this photo on this blog before, but tonight rescanned it to get a slightly better version. Behind the church and home is a small creek which flows into the Bazile Creek, which flows north through the Santee reservation and into the Missouri.

This is the interior of that church. I think I only got bawled out from the pulpit a couple of times, along with my peers in the back row.

My father liked to come over and play the pipe organ, and occasionally I would come over here and start up the big bellows in the basement so I could practice my keyboard lessons here instead of doing them on the piano in the house. It would have been better if I had done a lot more practicing on either keyboard, and less avoiding of it.

Not to make light of the other good things learned here, but I must confess that I started looking forward to going to church when I realized that it was the place where some girls who didn’t go to that district #3 school would be, too.

This scene is behind that church. The church owned 40 acres from the days when the pastor also kept a few cows to feed his family. It was a great place for adventure, especially since a creek ran through it. The fence ran up almost to the back of the church, and at least once the burro decided to bray away at a time when there was an appreciative audience inside the church. It was back here where our burro would occasionally try nochalantly to kill me. Dad eventually decided to sell it, and used some of the proceeds to buy me my first real bicycle. So I have some excuse for putting all this in a bicycle blog.