Midwest Guest

Indiana in a jar, Sechler’s Pickles factory store

We discover the most interesting things when we exit the freeway to take the slow way home from a trip.

We recently visited northeastern Indiana and decided to scout out a couple of other locations for future trips in the area just before crossing the state line to head home into Michigan.

Driving a road paralleling I-69, I spotted The Outlet Shoppes at Fremont. I’m not a big outlet shopper, but I wondered if the mall contained any athletic shoe outlets and drove into the parking lot of the mall’s south section. This section seemed fairly new and not fully occupied, so maybe it was easier to spot the pickle placard hanging in front of a space billed as The Pickle Factory.

Dill pickles, sweet pickles, bread and butter slices, gherkins, hot peppers—we love them all. Although it’s not like I hadn’t just returned from a trip to Tony Packo’s in Toledo Ohio, where I stocked up on Tim’s favorite Sweet Hots peppers and pickles mix and some bread and butter pickles for me, we still had to stop and check out Sechler’s pickle factory outlet store.

The store stocked plenty of pickles, condiments and other pickled products, but the real highlight of our visit was the pickle bar where we sampled a variety of tart dill and sweet pickles before making our selections.

You didn’t think we would be leaving the store without still more pickles to take home and crowd into the cabinet already full of Packos’ product, did you?

Sechler’s No Garlic Aged in Wood Genuine Dill Pickles tasted tart without being too vinegary like some dill pickles. A couple of jars of the Sechler’s Sweet Pickle chips joined those dill pickles in our basket, and we threw in a jar of Sechler’s dilled cauliflower as something new to try at our next picnic.

Sweet pickles are a Sechler specialty, and the store offered sweet pickles to suit a variety of tastes for sampling. I’m not a huge sweet pickle fan, but I liked several varieties of Sechler’s sweets because they lacked the cloying sweetness that you get with so many other sweet pickles.

Sechler’s traces its origins back to 1914, when founder Ralph Sechler ran a pickle station in the small town of St. Joe in extreme northeastern Indiana. Sechler worked for D.M. Sears, hauling fresh-picked cucumbers in salt brine by horse-drawn wagon to the train station for transport to Sears in Fort Wayne. Sechler stopped out of the pickle business for college and the Army before returning to work for Sears in 1919.

By 1921, Sechler leased pickle stations from Sears to begin building his own business. His wife Anna hand-packed jars of product for consumer sales in the Sechler home kitchen until 1930, when the Sechlers moved their business into a factory housed in a converted barn.

A third generation of the Sechlers still owns and operates the family pickle business in St. Joe, Indiana. The current 60,000-square-foot Sechler facility includes the old Sechler farmhouse which first housed the business and now serves as an office.

The Sechler family emphasizes using the best of new techniques to enhance, rather than replace their time-honored way of producing product. Family ownership, family recipes and fresh ingredients remain at the heart of the company’s success.

“We could make them faster, but that wouldn’t make them any better” remains the company’s tagline and philosophy of eschewing short cuts that might short-change customers by diminishing the quality of Sechler’s products.

The pickle plant offers tours from April through October. It was already too late in the day to drive over to make a tour when we discovered the store, but the tour is certainly on our list of things to do next time we visit the area.

Meanwhile, fun stuff on Sechler’s Web site includes a free downloadable recipe booklet in PDF format that features dishes like dilly pepperoni pizza, grilled cheese with dill pickle sandwiches and cranberry-orange pickle muffins—all using Sechler pickle or relish products.

And, for the curious, I did find my athletic shoe outlet store in the larger and more fully occupied north section of the Outlet Shoppes a block up the road.

Be sure to come back to Midwest Guest in coming weeks to read about our visits to Indiana’s Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum and Indiana author and naturalist Gene Stratton Porter’s historic home site.

© Dominique King 2009

Things To Do
Fremont

Seven sensational Great Lakes National Parks

Planning a trip to the great outdoors this summer?

The Great Lakes offer some great natural destinations

• Isle Royale is one of the most isolated and least visited of our nation’s National Parks, because a trip to this gem in the far reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula requires a three- or five-hour ferry ride (depending on whether you depart to the island from Houghton or Copper Harbor) to reach the park. There’s always the chance that rough water on Lake Superior can delay your scheduled ferry ride by a day or so, but what is an extra day or two extension of your vacation? When we last visited Isle Royale, we used our ferry-delay day to squeeze in a little extra hiking and picture-taking before returning to the mainland on the next day’s ferry.

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• Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore near Munising (MI) is another one of Michigan’s Lake Superior gems. Kayak on the lake for some of the best views of the park’s sandstone cliffs or hike back into some of the park’s most remote and beautiful waterfalls. Enjoy more than 40 miles of Lake Superior’s rugged shoreline but be advised that swimming in the largest, deepest and coldest of the Great Lakes is only for the hardiest of souls on the warmest of summer days. I’ve gone swimming in Lake Superior, and while it felt great at on a hot summer afternoon, even this cold water lover only lasted a very short time in the chilly water.
• Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, in the northwestern portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is a little closer to home for us so we’ve visited there many times over the years. Attractions like Port Oneida Rural Historic District preserve some of the area’s history, and the seven-mile Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive leads visitors past many of the area’s most interesting geological and natural sights. Many visitors best know Sleeping Bear for its challenging dune climb, where a beautiful view of Glen Lake rewards those who make it to the top.
• Cuyahoga Valley National Park, located close to Cleveland (OH) along the crooked Cuyahoga River, offers visitors a look at the history of transportation the Ohio and Erie Canalway. Even as the park is quite near heavily urban areas of northern Ohio, it offers visitors plenty of natural wonders like wildlife and waterfalls to enjoy. I hope to return to the park sometime with my bicycle to ride along the mostly level Towpath Trail that follows the path once traveled by mules to tow boats along the historic Ohio and Erie Canal.


• The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, which includes 21 islands and 12 miles of mainland along Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, offers especially plentiful opportunities for serious kayakers and those who love photographing Great Lakes lighthouses. We loved staying In Bayfield (WI), where visitors can easily book shuttles to island hop or purchase tickets for one of our favorite trips—a sunset cruise past some of the area’s lighthouses.
• Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore offers visitors another look at the dunes along Lake Michigan. Indiana may not have a lot of Great Lakes shoreline, but this park showcases some of the best of that limited real estate. The National Park Service planned five prescribed fires at the park this spring as a means for landscape and ecosystem restoration, invasive species eradication and biodiversity protection. This project should offer park visitors an interesting view of how nature restores itself in coming years.
• Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota offers camping, hiking and wildlife watching opportunities, but requires visitors take to the water to best explore the area. Voyageurs paddled their birch bark canoes through the area two centuries ago as they transported animal pelts and other trade goods. Today, canoes, kayaks, houseboats and motorboats cruise these waters, and summer visitors can even take a guided tour aboard a 26-foot North Canoe to see the park much as the long-ago voyageurs did.
 

Have you visited any of these sensational Great Lakes parks?

© Dominique King 2009

Photo Friday

This poor house looked like it was crying for attention when I spotted it as we were driving along a muddy road in northwest Michigan’s Port Oneida Rural Historic in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Tim stopped the car and we got out to take a few photos of the abandoned house perched precariously on a long-abandoned plot of land in the deserted town.

Read about Port Oneida’s history, the story of the Weaver home depicted here and efforts to celebrate the area’s role in northern Michigan’s agricultural and logging history in my story about this designated historic district.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King

Port Oneida Rural Historic District celebrates northern Michigan’s agricultural heritage

Port Oneida resembled a ghost town when we visited one recent winter morning to wander around the spooky and dilapidated Weaver Farm.

Snow crunched underfoot as we walked the grounds, peered through sagging door frames and wondered about the lives of the home’s long-gone residents.

The Weaver house may be one of the more intriguing stops on a self-guided tour of Port Oneida because it makes such a great photo subject and captures some of the despair as the small settlement fell on hard times and became a shadow of the farming, lumbering and port community people once called home.

Today, Port Oneida survives as a Rural Historical District under the auspices of the National Park Service. An act of Congress established the park at Sleeping Bear Dunes in 1970, and the Port Oneida Rural Historic District of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.

The Port Oneida district covers more than 3400 acres and has over 120 buildings, most of them in far better repair than the Weaver Farm.

Port Oneida visitors can stop at the Philip A. Hart Visitor Center in Empire to pick up information about the area, or they can download a PDF file of the park’s Port Oneida Driving Tour booklet.

The booklet tells the story of many of the farms, homes, businesses and other sites in the district, plus it includes a short history of Port Oneida.

Settlers from Germany began living in Port Oneida during the mid-1800s. Logging in northern Michigan offered opportunities for economic growth during the late-1800s, and the town grew large enough to support a blacksmith, a general store, a post office and a boarding house.

Logging drastically thinned the surrounding forests, and coal-burning steamships became more prevalent by the late 1800s. Loss of industry sped the demise of Port Oneida and most residents abandoned the original town site by 1908.

Farmers who remained in the area scratched out a modest living as sandy soil and an unreliable water supply made making a living in Port Oneida more and more difficult. Most residents left the area by the 1930s and 1940s.

The story of the Weaver Farm pretty much parallels the history of the settlement.

Jacob Mantz first purchased the land in the 1860s, selling it to Harrison and Almeda Weaver in the 1880s. The Weavers built the house in the early 1890s.

Harrison Weaver, a talented blacksmith, shod many horses in the Port Oneida area. He wasn’t nearly as successful as a farmer, though.

The farm’s poor location and drainage meant it often flooded. The family eventually lost the most of the land because of delinquent taxes around 1940.

Even as the Weavers and other Port Oneida residents eventually left the area, its rebirth as a district dedicated to preserving the agricultural history and settlement of northern Michigan means the memories of Port Oneida live on today.

Efforts to make history come alive for today’s visitors include an annual two-day Port Oneida Fair in early August with displays, tours and activities like a Civil War Encampment, blacksmithing, horse-and-wagon rides, storytelling, quilting, folk music and craft demonstrations.

I still enjoyed visiting Port Oneida on a cold winter day, feeling the presence of the ghostly spirits of time past as I roamed the deserted Weaver place.  

© Dominique King 2009

Sandusky Ohio, more than Cedar Point

Sandusky seems synonymously linked with Cedar Point amusement park for many people. Driving north from Route 2 into Sandusky on Milan Road, where I passed numerous water park resorts, didn’t do much to dispel the impression of Sandusky as one big over-chlorinated playground.

Driving west to get on Hayes Drive to head into downtown Sandusky, the landscape more closely resembled the northern Ohio port town along Lake Erie that city residents know as home.

I crossed Grant, Buchanan and Pierce Streets. I’m familiar with U.S. presidential history and Ohio as the birthplace of eight presidents, so I quickly noticed a pattern developing as I approached Taylor, Polk and Tyler Streets and headed towards Adams Street.

Once on Adams, I quickly found my destination, Sandusky’s beautiful Carnegie Library.

I realize the library isn’t the typical attraction that draws tourists to Sandusky, but knowing I’d be in northern Ohio for a conference, I’d surfed the Web for other interesting places to go in the area and stumbled upon the Sandusky History blog.

The blog, a Sandusky Library and Follett House Museum staff project, uses their collection of local history materials to produce a fascinating look at people, places and events throughout northern Ohio history. Recent articles include information about the library’s ongoing series of programs exploring the 1930s, as well as articles about a 1920s community songbook published to encourage fellowship inspired by community singing and a story about Victorian era trade cards advertising patent medicines sold by Sandusky’s Graham Drug Store—all illustrated by photos and paper ephemera from local history collections.

I also learned about the city’s Carnegie library, funded through a donation from the Scottish-American philanthropist who made his fortune in the steel industry. Andrew Carnegie helped fund more than 2,500 libraries between 1883 and 1929. Carnegie libraries usually featured a then-innovative design with open stacks allowing people to choose their own books to read, as opposed to asking a clerk for books from stacks closed to the public.

Women in Sandusky organized a subscription library after receiving a donation of books and property from the city’s Young Men’s Christian and Library Association in 1870.  A $2 a per year library membership fee and a small millage supported the library, housed in a room at the city’s high school and later in the local Masonic Temple.

Fundraising efforts resulted in enough money to purchase a home on Adams Street for $10,000 in 1898. Mrs. Jay O. Moss of Sandusky secured a $50,000 grant from Carnegie to fund the library, with the city pledging $3,000 per year to maintain the building. A permanent library on the site became a reality by 1901, making it one of the three earliest Carnegie libraries in Ohio.

In 1996, the library purchased the former Erie County Jail, an 1883-vintage building on adjacent property. A $10 million project renovated and connected the two buildings, both listed on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. A 2004 celebration rededicated a newly expanded library that went from 24,000 to 62,000 square feet, a building billed on the library’s Web site as innovative and architecturally unique in its re-use of historic buildings.

I love cool architecture and renovation projects that imaginatively use vintage buildings, so I had to see this library while I was in the area.

The complex takes up most of a city block and the exterior retains much of the stately character of the library’s original turreted limestone building and the jail’s ornamental Victorian architecture.

The library’s interior with its vintage dark woodwork and high-ceilinged rooms felt surprisingly open and airy to me. The entire interior seemed to merge seamlessly into a cohesive whole with plenty of spaces for open stacks, computer stations and study areas.

It certainly isn’t your typical Sandusky amusement park destination, but I enjoyed the artful restoration and learning a bit about Sandusky’s history.

© Dominique King 2009

Photo Friday

The first week in April here went from featuring heavy wet snow, when a “snow bunny” from my neighborhood hopped into this blog last Photo Friday, to a beautiful sunny weekend that found me taking off to explore the great boardwalk nature trail in Ohio’s Maumee Bay State Park.

Check out the complete story about my afternoon exploring Maumee Bay’s Nature Center along the Lake Erie shore. That afternoon was so nice that I dared to think it might soon be warm enough to hike, bike, canoe, geocache and do all those things I’ve been missing all winter long.

Meanwhile, I’ve embarked on yet another new adventure.

This month marked my debut as a staff blogger at The Urbane Life blog. The Urbane Life is a community blog for Urbane Apartments, a growing group of apartment buildings, luxury lofts and condos in metropolitan Detroit.

Interested in stories about people, places, events and issues in and around metro Detroit? Please come check us out.

Curious about what I’ve been up to there? See my story about Michigan Glass Month and local art glass shows, or read about the only United States showing of the fabulous BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year show at the Detroit Zoo. You can even read my bio and see a photo of me out on the geocaching trail.

I’d love to know what everyone thinks about my work at The Urbane Life.

And, as always, I’m still here at Midwest Guest and looking forward to sharing more stories about my travels in the wider Midwest region.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009

Ohio Oasis at Maumee Bay State Park

I love finding a little green oasis and patch of peace and quiet, especially when it’s easily accessible to a heavily urban area.

The nature center at Maumee Bay State Park sits just a dozen or so miles east of downtown Toledo Ohio, but wandering the scenic boardwalk trail through the Lake Erie marshland, you feel miles away from Toledo’s heavily traveled highways and port area.

I recently enjoyed a writers’ retreat weekend at the Maumee Bay State Park Resort. I spotted the entrance to the park’s Nature Center just across the parking lot from the resort’s main entrance and found myself drawn away from an afternoon of workshops for my own private mini-retreat along the center’s trails on a beautiful early spring day.

The center’s two-mile interpretive trail takes visitors through meadow, marshland and wooded areas. I opted to take the longer loop, armed with my camera and a couple of free hours to roam and take photos.

One conference attendee from Texas strongly advised me to wear a scarf, hat, mittens and jacket when she learned I intended to walk the trail, but I guess I’m more used to early spring weather here as the cool crisp air of an afternoon in early April made it a comfortable hike requiring only a light jacket to keep the chill at bay. Much of the boardwalk threads through golden marshland, so I imagine it might be a warm trip requiring a hat and some sunscreen on a hot summer day.

A chorus of bullfrogs greeted me as I began the trip through the woods and out to the marshland. Further along the trail, nearly a dozen deer peacefully grazed in the woods, undisturbed the light stream of center visitors hiking the boardwalk.

This area of Ohio, along the Lake Erie shore, is well-known as a great place for birders. The Nature Center site includes a section listing recent bird sightings along the trail, with nearly 50 different types of birds listed in the current sightings the week of my visit. Trumpeter swans, killdeer, mourning dove, great-horned owl, downy woodpecker, northern flicker, golden-crowned kinglet and the all-American robin were just a few of the sightings reported the first week of April this year.

I particularly enjoyed the walk out to the two-story observation tower in the cattail marsh from where, if you looked closely, you could spot the Toledo Harbor Lighthouse and the Fermi Nuclear Station in the far distance.

The Trautman Nature Center at the trailhead has numerous displays, events, viewing windows and a small store, which makes it a nice stop at the end of the trail to browse through brochures, watch some of the birds through the floor-to-ceiling viewing windows or ask the year-round naturalist about the animals and environment along the nature trail.

The trail is open from dawn until dusk and includes a wheelchair-accessible loop. Check the center’s Web site for seasonal hours.

I completed my walk with plenty of photos taken and the renewed energy to tackle the rest of my conference workshops and open reading sessions. And perhaps the best thing about the trip was realizing that this center is within easy driving distance of Detroit, making return trips for an afternoon hike or photo-taking excursion a definite must-do on my summer travel list.

© Dominique King 2009

Five Midwest lighthouses to love

I recently read an article online listing what the author judged as the five “most alluring” lighthouses in the United States.

The list included some admittedly stunning and scenic lighthouses, but not one of our beautiful Midwest lights made this list.

So to start to remedy this omission, I offer this list of Midwest lights I’ve particularly enjoyed visiting over the years.

• Point Betsie Lighthouse, near Frankfort (MI) on Lake Michigan, celebrated its 150th birthday last year. I’ve frequently visited Betsie throughout the years and enjoyed many hours walking along the long expanse of white sand beach where the light stands sentinel.
• Marblehead Lighthouse, near Port Clinton (OH) on Lake Erie, is within a couple hours’ drive of home, so it is another light I’ve often visited. Greenery and red ribbons decorate the light tower during the winter holidays, and the rocky shore is a great place for shore fishing and enjoying a the summer breeze off of the lake while seeing the muted outlines of Cedar Point amusement park rides across the lake in the hazy distance.
• Split Rock Lighthouse, near Two Harbors (MN) on Lake Superior, sits perched high on a cliff overlooking Minnesota’s scenic north shore area. I loved taking the nearly 200 stairs down the steep cliff from the light to the water to take photos, although the climb up those same stairs was quite the project!

• Big Sable Point Lighthouse, near Ludington (MI) on Lake Michigan, requires a little time to get out to and photograph. The level terrain of the 1.5-mile trail out to the light is a fairly easy walk, even during winter if there isn’t too much snow.
• Copper Harbor Lighthouse, near Copper Harbor (MI) on Lake Superior, is another lighthouse that requires a little extra time to visit. A short ferry ride takes visitors out to the tip of the rugged Keweenaw Peninsula for tours of the lighthouse from late May through mid-October.

These are only a few of our many beautiful Midwest lighthouses.

Do you have a favorite Midwest lighthouse?

© Dominique King 2009

Debut at The Urbane Life blog

This past week marked my debut as a staff blogger at The Urbane Life blog.

The Urbane Life is a community blog for Urbane Apartments, a growing group of apartment buildings, luxury lofts and condos in metropolitan Detroit.

I find it fascinating to see how the crew at Urbane Apartments has a real dedication to using “new media” to foster personal connections with tenants, prospective tenants and other members of their local community. I found The Urbane Life blog, commented on some posts there and began communicating with a couple Urbane folks (mostly on Twitter).

I always thought there was a story there, but I never imagined I might become a small piece of the story until approached about writing stories featuring local people, places, events and issues for The Urbane Life.

This week I chat with a Royal Oak, Michigan gallery owner about Michigan Glass Month and list several metro Detroit glass art exhibits. Check out Artisans play with fire during Michigan Glass Month at The Urbane Life.

And remember to come back to Midwest Guest, where I’ll continue to share stories about my travels around the Midwest and beyond!

© Dominique King

Photo Friday

It’s the time of year when some children start looking for the Easter Bunny to arrive at their homes carrying a basket of jelly beans and chocolate eggs.

But here in southeast Michigan, we’re having one of those spring seasons where our bunny guests may need to borrow a sled or skis to get here.

Tim spotted this little guy on a lawn in our neighborhood and took me back over there so I could snap these shots to share here today.

Gives a whole new meaning to the term “snow bunny”, doesn’t it?

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2009