Midwest Guest

Visiting Ohio Northern University at Ada, Ohio

We love visiting college campuses for cultural activities, beautiful art, historic buildings and green spaces.

The pretty little campus at Ohio Northern University (ONU) in Ada, Ohio, offers a lot of the amenities and activities you might expect from a larger school, along with a friendly, small-town atmosphere.

Henry Solomon Lehr, a Civil War veteran and Ada schoolmaster, jockeyed his schooling around working full time, eventually graduating with a PhD from eastern Ohio's Mount Union College while he worked in Ada. His experiences as a student shaped his belief that colleges should offer schedules and classes that students who needed to work and support themselves could more easily fit into their lives.

As Ada's schoolmaster in 1866, Lehr began offering evening "select school" classes for students wanting education beyond the basic school curriculum. The classes were popular and the town supported Lehr's request for money to buy land and construct a building for the "select school", which opened as Northwest Ohio Normal School in 1871.

The normal school (or teachers' college) had nearly 150 students and accepted women as students and faculty from the very beginning.

The school grew through the late-nineteenth century, expanding beyond training public school teachers by establishing separate colleges for business, engineering, pharmacy and law during the 1880s and becoming Ohio Normal University in 1885.

State funding for the school dried up in 1899. In 1900, Lehr sold the school to the United Methodist Church in order to save it, and the school remains a private, Methodist-affiliated institution today.

In 1903, the school became Ohio Northern University.

School officials expanded the school in the early 1900s, establishing a medical school with the Fort Wayne College of Medicine in Indiana in 1904 and adding an Agricultural College in 1911. By the 1930s, ONU dropped disbanded the medical school, agricultural school and a high school prep program.

ONU began growing again after World War II, with recent years bringing some of ONU's biggest developments, like the building and opening of an inn and conference center on campus in 2008.

ONU has 20 varsity sports, and its Polar Bears compete in NCAA's Division III. We were particularly impressed with the school's vintage-2004 Dial-Roberson stadium situated on the west campus, an area formerly home to the defunct agricultural school's farm.

The fact that ONU retained ownership of the farm after its agricultural program's 1923 dissolution contributes to its spacious feel and room for outdoor facilities like an 18-hole disc golf course (established in 2003) and the school's fabled "Green Monster".

The Green Monster began as a 2.5-mile jogging path around the campus in 1991, earning its nickname when physical education students dubbed it "a monster of a walk" during classes.

In 2007, donors placed 12 western-themed, cast-bronze statues of works by artists like Frederic Remington, Charles Russell and James Fraser along the path. Ten of the works are Remington reproductions, and many refer to that section of the path as the Remington Walkway.

ONU has plenty of other attractions for culture fans with a number of public art pieces on the central campus, the Freed Center for the Performing Arts (featuring an eclectic schedule of music, dance, plays, lectures and other stage shows) and the Elszy Gallery of Art.

We spent a lot of our time there wandering campus and taking pictures. We also managed to dodge the raindrops the weekend we visited to find one of several geocaches hidden on campus.

Today, ONU has about 3,600 students. The school offers 70 different majors, and its highly regarded academic programs helped to place it second among 371 Midwest Regional Colleges in U.S. News' "America's Best Colleges 2012" ranking.

Check out my story about The "football capital of the world" at Ada, Ohio come back later this week for my review of the Inn at Ohio Northern University.

You can also follow ONU on Twitter and Facebook.

Want to learn more about the history of Ada? Check out Hardin County (Postcard History) by Ronald I. Marvin Jr.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Ye Olde Winter-Friendly Geocaching Event in Cambridge, Ohio

Thanks to Julie Henning for this story about an upcoming geocaching event in Cambridge, Ohio.

Take a trip back in time this winter, experiencing old world England in historic downtown Cambridge, Ohio. Created in 2006, Dickens Victorian Village is a public art exhibition on display from early-November through mid-January along Wheeling Avenue in downtown Cambridge. Inspired by the characters and scenes from Charles Dickens’ novels, Dickens Victorian Village features 185 life-like mannequins and 80 scenes this 2011-2012 season.

Cambridge is also ground zero for a winter-friendly geocaching event.

Partnering with the Cambridge/Guernesy County Visitors & Convention Bureau for the second year in a row, Ohio geocacher David "CatsInTheCradle" Waters just announced the approval of the Cambridge Christmas at Dickens Village II event on Geocaching.com. (GC34JJ3).

“I moved into the [Cambridge] area in June of 2010 and I knew of the Dickens Victorian Village. I wanted to share it with the geocaching community. There are some similar events that highlight great city/town tourism events (GC1DM1V comes to mind) and I wanted to show off an amazing Cambridge attraction.”

Waters will place approximately 70 temporary caches on an approximately one mile route along Wheeling Avenue and by the Guernsey County Courthouse for the event scheduled from 3:00 p.m.until 9:30 p.m.on Saturday, November 12, 2011. The event is 100% wheelchair and stroller accessible, participants are encouraged to gather around coffee, hot chocolate, and cookies, geocaching before and after one of four computer-controlled—30,000 lights choreographed and set to music—holiday lights shows at the courthouse.

Holding the event twice in 2010, Waters recalls, “We had about 40 at the first event and about 75 at the second one.” Coordinating the event with the help of geocaching friends, last year’s event drew attendees from the Pittsburgh Area Geocaching Association, Ohio Valley Geocaching Association, and The Wilderness Center Geocaching Club.

“I had geocachers come in from within a 100 mile area,” Waters added. “Many of them were people I know or friends of people I know, but I had one group came in from Toledo Ohio just for the event. When I did the same event for my children's eSchool, Ohio Virtual Academy, I had a family drive in all the way from Dayton.”

“We were blown away by the number of people that attended last year’s geocaching event,” said Jonett Haberfield, Dickens Victorian Village Co-Chair. “People came as far away as Pittsburgh. We plan to provide special souvenirs and coupons for geocaches, as well as advertise the event in both the website and 2011 Visitor’s Guide.”

Fundamentally, the event is similar to last year. Dickens Victorian Village is bigger and better, and the city of Cambridge has been undergoing revitalization all summer long. “The Structure of my event has not changed, but Cambridge just had a facelift, so the benches and light posts are new 'antiques' and the vignettes will not all be in the same places they were,” Waters added. In addition to donations from Haberfield and Dickens Victorian Village, Waters hopes to have engraved wooden nickels available to this year’s event participants.

Bio: Julie Henning is the Feed Me and Geocaching editor for Road Trips for Families, a site for families who love the open road. An expert in family-friendly Wisconsin, she has written two iPhone apps, Madison Loves Kids and Milwaukee Loves Kids. A member of the Midwest Travel Writers Association, Julie is a regular contributor to her hometown newspaper in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, where she lives with her husband and three young children.

Text © Julie Henning 2011 All rights reserved. Photos courtesy of David Waters and the Cambridge/Guernsey County CVB. Text and photos used with permission.

Nature and history at Michigan's Port Crescent State Park

We discovered Port Crescent State Park near Port Austin on Lake Huron at the tip of Michigan's Thumb when we looked for flat-water canoeing in the area. We've visited this park on Lake Huron many times since our trip on the Pinnebog River.

On our most recent trip to the park we walked the Dunes Nature Trail, a three-quarter mile interpretive trail where visitors can learn about sand dune ecology, wildlife, plants and dune forests. Hikers can access one the park's longer hiking and cross-country ski trails or hop off onto part of the park's 900 feet of beachside boardwalk from the nature trail loop.

The Dunes Nature Trail, converted from a 1970s-era fitness trail and completed in 2009 with an Access to Recreation Grant, has a flat-limestone aggregate surface and strategically placed benches, making it accessible for physically challenged visitors.

Port Crescent State Park, and nearby Albert E. Sleeper State Park near Caseville, are two hours from the Detroit area, making them great for campers looking for a quick weekend trip. Port Crescent has fewer campsites than Sleeper, but it has a wider variety of day use activities and barrier-free facilities like a recently added 400-square-foot Camper Cabin with a waterfront view and the Dunes trail.

Dunes Nature Trail

Port Crescent State Park is on three miles of sandy shoreline along the big lake's Saginaw Bay where visitors can enjoy swimming and walking the beach in addition to hiking, fishing, canoeing, cross-country skiing, birding and (in season) hunting.

The park sits on the former site of a bustling mid-1800s company town where steam-powered sawmills along the Pinnebog employed hundreds of area residents. Others worked at blockhouses where they extracted brine from evaporated water to produce salt.

The town of Port Crescent had a two-story school, Lutheran church, company store, hotel and tavern along its several streets.

One sawmill became so busy salvaging thousands of trees felled in one of the infamous fires experienced by the Midwest in 1871 that it added a 120-foot brick chimney to help power the plant.

In 1881, another fire swept through the Thumb region, destroying the area's timber resources.

The lumber mills closed, as did the firewood-fueled salt plants. Workers dismantled some of the buildings and an 800-foot dock, moving them north to Oscoda, Michigan. Some Port Crescent residents moved their houses to nearby towns. By 1894, all of the buildings in Port Crescent were gone, leaving few traces of the town behind.

The State of Michigan purchased the site for the park during the 1950s.

Today, you'll find remnants of the brick mill chimney and an old steel bridge in the park.

This visit, we drove to the nearby Port Crescent Cemetery to find a geocache. Seeing the town's old burial grounds requires a short walk through the woods (a welcome relief from the record heat while we visited, but a bit mosquito-ridden). The old cemetery had its share of broken headstones, but it seemed reasonably well cared for and gave us a feel for the old ghost town's residents. We found the cache and a few interesting headstones like this one made from bricks used to construct Port Crescent's brick mill chimney.

Want to learn more about the history of Port Crescent and other small towns in the area? Check out Huron County Michigan (Images of America) by the Huron County Historical Society.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Port Austin

Check out the World's Largest Teapot in Chester, West Virginia

Chester, West Virginia, is mighty proud of their giant teapot. Signs around town direct visitors' attention to this landmark, and it looks as good as new thanks to the efforts of a local Eagle Scout and his friends.

We first spotted the World's Largest Teapot this past May while exploring Ohio's leg of the Lincoln Highway. The teapot sits just over the state line in West Virginia, and when we first saw it, it looked like it needed a bit of repainting and repair.

We visited Pittsburgh in June, so we decided to take the Lincoln Highway out of Pittsburgh on our way home. The route again took us through the tiny corner of West Virginia that is home to the teapot, and because there is a geocache there, we wanted to find it and check off a new state on our cache list.

We found the cache and also found that Eagle Scout John "J.P." Raynor adopted the teapot as a community project, so it was in the middle of a restoration.

This landmark started life as a huge barrel and part of a Hire's Root Beer promotional campaign during the 1930s.

Pottery merchant William "Babe" Devon bought it in 1938 and shipped it to Chester. Pottery was big business in the region, and Devon converted the barrel into a giant teapot to sit in front of his pottery outlet.

Devon added a spout and handle to the barrel, covered it all in tin, painted it red and white, and finished off his creation with a large glass ball on the roof as a knob for the lid of the kettle.

Devon also hired some local kids to run a food concession and souvenir stand from the 14-foot tall, 14-foot diameter structure.

During World War II, gas rationing caused a decrease in traffic and decline in the pottery business, so Devon closed the teapot.

In 1947, Devon sold his business with the teapot to Mary Wucherer and Rhonda Cain. They operated the teapot as a concession stand until it became too costly in the late 1960s, but continued to sell lawn and garden gifts from the building for a few more years.

Cecil and Alice Fletcher bought the business and teapot in 1971, painting the landmark pot blue and white and continuing to sell pottery and other gifts from the little building until closing down the business.

By 1984, the teapot sat abandoned and a local telephone company bought the site. The phone company razed the larger building that housed the main pottery businesses and considered demolishing the teapot as well.

Local residents rallied to save the teapot, getting voters in the city of Chester to approve its restoration and raising $3,000 to do the work. The phone company offered to donate the structure to the town.

The teapot moved around Chester as debate raged over where to permanently locate it. Bad weather continued to take its toll on the teapot's condition.

In 1990, Chester's City Council approved additional money for the teapot restoration and relocated it at a high-traffic corner at the junction of State Route 2 and U.S. 30, the current route of the classic Lincoln Highway and a part of the popular Rock Springs amusement park from 1897 until 1970.

Restoration continued through 1990, replacing the deteriorating parts with more durable materials and repainting the teapot in its original red-and-white color scheme. Workers sealed and reframed the doors and windows from the concession-stand era. The teapot got a new spout and handle, a painted basketball "knob" to replace the long-lost glass finial, and a fenced, landscaped space.

There were occasional efforts to repair and repaint the landmark throughout recent years. It underwent a major restoration in 2007 as part of the Hampton Hotels Save-A-Landmark program when 15 volunteers rehabbed the teapot and Hampton Hotels donated money to help fund future repair and restoration efforts.

In early 2011, Eagle Scout John Raynor attended a town meeting while earning a communications merit badge. He learned that the teapot needed repair and repainting, so he adopted it as a community service project, enlisting his mom, fellow scouts and friends to help.

We happened to stop by to find the geocache mid-way through the most recent restoration, when I took photos of the teapot missing its spout and sporting an all-white primer coat of paint.

Raynor and his crew completed the work by July. You can see a couple of photos of the completed project in the photo gallery for the cache.

Great job, John!

I wrote a bit about pottery history in this region in Visit the Fiesta factory in Newell, West Virginia.

You can also learn more about the history of pottery making in Ohio Valley towns like Chester by checking out Ohio Valley Pottery Towns by Pamela Lee Gray.

Check out Rock Springs Park by Joseph A. Comm to learn about the defunct amusement park that formerly occupied the teapot's current site.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Chester

Midwest road-trip reads and other useful road tools

For me, there's nothing better than a good road trip, and part of the fun involves planning your route to make sure you don't miss some of the must-sees while you're on the road.

Here are a few great reads and planning tools to check out before your next Midwestern road tripping adventure!

I enjoy Amy Rea's A closer look at flyover land blog, which explores every corner of Minnesota. Her newly published Backroads & Byways of Minnesota looks like a great addition to any Midwest road trips library. Each chapter highlights a different route in the state, offering practical tips, information, and tons of suggestions about what to do along the way. You can also get the book as a Kindle edition.

What Amy does for Minnesota, Matt Forster does for Michigan in his new guidebook Backroads & Byways of Michigan. Matt's book, like Amy's, is also available as a Kindle edition. You can check in with Matt at his Facebook page for the guidebook.

We recently drove the length of the Lincoln Highway through Ohio. Travelers started road tripping along this east-west highway, the first transcontinental highway in the United States, when it opened to traffic in 1913. The highway stretched from San Francisco to New York City, although subsequent realignments and expressways that eventually superseded the old road make it a challenge to follow the historic route in spots. The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate by Michael Wallis is an invaluable guide to some of the most interesting and quirky stops along the historic route.

We want to drive the Indiana leg of the Lincoln Highway soon, so I definitely want to check out The Lincoln Highway Across Indiana by Jan Shupert-Arick and the Indiana Lincoln Highway Association.

Tim and I both love northern Minnesota and enjoyed traveling its legendary Highway 61. I bought Tales of the Road: Highway 61 by Cathy Wurzer, which is a companion piece to a public television documentary, in anticipation of a trip we'd planned to take a couple of years ago. Highway 61 began carrying travelers through the state and along its beautiful North Shore in the 1920s, and Wurzer's book covers a lot of the road's history and stories behind some of the cool roadside architecture that still exists from the highway's early days. Sadly, we had to cancel the trip, but when we do get back to Minnesota, Wurzer's book will make the trip with us.

You can slip the Historic Michigan Travel Guide by the Historical Society of Michigan into a jacket or camera bag pocket. It is chock-full of information about 300 of Michigan's museums, historic sites and other history-related destinations. The listings include information like availability of parking, hours, fees, and accessibility along with each attraction's highlights. We've got an older edition of this book, but the newest edition also includes GPS-ready addresses in the listings.

Love lighthouses and waterfalls?  Check out A Traveler's Guide to 116 Michigan Lighthouses and A guide to 199 Michigan Waterfalls by Laurie Penrose, Bill Penrose and Ruth Penrose. These two guidebooks include maps and photos to help you find your way to some of my favorite Great Lakes State sights.

Best of the Midwest: Rediscovering America's Heartland by Dan Kaercher of Midwest Living Magazine is a few years old, but it's still a great guide to the heritage, scenery, attractions and people of 12-state region the magazine considers to be in the Midwest (for the record, those states are Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin).

Want a real taste of the region? Check out Taste of the Midwest: 12 States, 101 Recipes, 150 Meals, 8,207 Miles and Millions of Memories, in which Dan Kaercher eats his way through the Midwest and shares the stories and recipes for some of our most quintessential Midwest eats.

I wouldn't dream of leaving home without a good map. I've worn out a number of my trusty Michigan Atlas & Gazetteer books by the Delorme Mapping Company over the years, and I think we're working on about our third copy of the Ohio Atlas & Gazetteer at this point. Delorme produces map books for each state that include detailed maps and reference lists that include parks, historic sites, wineries, hiking trails, or other things specific to each state.

Books aside, we also find our GPS invaluable in our travels. We have an older unit similar to Garmin's GPSMAP 62sc Handheld Navigator loaded with Garmin City Navigator maps.

This unit works great when we're out of the car geocaching. On our last outing with it in Ohio and West Virginia, it consistently led us to within a few feet of the caches we sought.

We use it in the car with a holder mounted to the windshield with a powerful suction cup, but we find that the screen is a little small and doesn't always include enough information on it when we're trying to navigate through a larger city on an expressway.

So, we're shopping for a GPS with a larger screen, lifetime maps and traffic information specifically designed for use in the car. We like our Garmin handheld, so we're looking at possibilities like Garmin's nüvi 2460LMT, or maybe even a TomTom VIA 1505TM or Magellan RoadMate 5045-LM.

Do you have any GPS suggestions for us or suggestions for other great road-trip reads?

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Ohio's Hocking Valley bricks pave the nation

Brick walkway at Ohio University campus

We knew Ohio's Hocking Valley was home to many 19th century brick factories and learned the names of some of them as we walked the brick sidewalks of Ohio University's campus at Athens, but it wasn't until we searched for a geocache in nearby Nelsonville that we saw one of the old kilns that produced so many of those bricks.

Ohio University campus

The cache is long-gone, but the bricks and the kilns still exist as the last traces of the industry that once paved the nation.

Extracting natural resources like coal, clay and salt were major industries in the Hocking Valley throughout the 19th century.

Early brick makers dug clay and shale from area hills, processed and shaped bricks from the materials by hand, and baked them in the sun or a makeshift kiln at building sites. Early brick buildings in the area, like Ohio University's Cutler Hall built in 1816, used "soft" bricks produced this way.

Thaddeus Longstreet opened the first brick plant near Nelsonville in 1871. Nelsonville had five major plans operating by the latter half of the 19th century, employing an average of 120 men each.

Brick walkway in village park at Franklin, Michigan

The brick making industry grew with the growth of cities and towns needing bricks for building construction, paving mud roads and building of municipal water and sewer systems.

The Nelsonville Brick Company opened in 1877. The company manufactured brands like Nelsonville Block, Hallwood Block, Hocking Block and decorative sidewalk bricks.

Brick walkway at Ohio University

Nelsonville Brick expanded in 1880, adding more kilns and manufacturing nearly 25 million block and bricks each year. The kiln where we found the geocache was part of the 1880 addition. 

Brick-making was a slow and laborious process in the late-1800s plants.

Miners dug clay and shale out of crude open mines with steam shovels. Some companies bought material from coal companies that could easily mine for clay and shale at the same time that they mined coal.

Workers loaded shaped clay and shale bricks into the coal-fueled beehive kilns by hand. It took two days to load a kiln, six days to fire the bricks, and three more days for the bricks to cool before workers could unload them.

Beehive brick kiln at Nelsonville, Ohio

A good production pace in those days would be 7,000 bricks a day using four workers and a horse. In 1890, one brickyard set a record by producing 10,262 bricks in one day.

Variations in brick color depended on placement within the kiln, and the resulting temperature variance, or whether the brick was clay (cream colored) or shale (red).

Brick pavers are usually heavier than structural facing brick used for building construction, and most of the Hocking Valley brick makers specialized in paving bricks.

Salt glazing, produced by shoveling salt into the fire at high temperatures, gave Nelsonville Brick pavers a distinctive finish and made them more watertight. The company won first prize at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis for their Nelsonville Block pavers.  

In 1910, one brick trade magazine reported that several Hocking Valley-area brick plants added new kilns and equipment.

The combined capacity of Nelsonville Brick's two plants was 100,000 bricks per day by 1910. The Athens Brick company reported employing 135 men and producing between 65,000 and 75,000 per day that same year.

Brick walkway in village park at Franklin, Michigan

Southeast Ohio had a national reputation for quality bricks, shipping millions of bricks to places like Chicago, Canada, New York and Michigan. We recently found a small brick-paved walkway around a gazebo in the village park at Franklin, Michigan, made with Hocking Valley bricks.

The Hocking Valley brick industry slowed around the time of World War I, when increasing use of concrete reduced demand for the more labor-intensive and expensive process of bricklaying for paving streets.

The Nelsonville Brick Company closed in 1937, and most of the remaining Hocking Valley brick plants were gone by the end of the 1940s.

In 1979, restoration work began on the old kilns. Nelsonville established Brick Kiln Park in 1980 on the grounds of the former Nelsonville Brick Company.

The Nelsonville Area Chamber of Commerce gained stewardship of the park as the result of a donation in 2008, further restoring the structures and working with Industrial Ceramics students from nearby Hocking College who maintain the kilns as a community service program.

My story, Back to school at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, includes a photo of Cutler Hall and some of the school's vintage brick streets and walkways.

My story about Franklin, Michigan, The town that time forgot, has a photo of the park gazebo and its brick walkway.

Want to learn more about Nelsonville and the surrounding area? Check out Little Cities of Black Diamonds by Jeffrey T. Darbee and Nancy A. Recchie.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Nelsonville

Michigan Civil War vets spark life-long interest in history for Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Young Bruce Catton, who sat mesmerized by the tales of old Civil War veterans in the small northern Michigan town of Benzonia, Michigan, grew up to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of many popular histories of the War Between the States.

We often visit Benzonia, and once found a particularly tricky geocache in the park where young Bruce played Civil War games with his buddies near the turn of the twentieth century.

I knew about the Benzonia/Catton connection, and with the approach of the Civil War sesquicentennial, I thought it was a good time to share the story.

Congregationalists settle Benzonia, establish school

In 1858, Reverend Charles E. Bailey and four families from a Congregational church in Oberlin, Ohio, arrived in northern Michigan's wilderness to establish a Christian community with a college modeled after Oberlin.

The school began as Grand Traverse College offering classes at someone's home, and later in a two-story frame building in Benzonia.

The school offered college preparatory classes and teacher training, accepting students of both genders and of all races and ethnic origin.

The school started with 13 students in 1860. That number grew to 150 students by 1875, with many graduates becoming teachers in western Michigan's lumbering towns.

In 1891, Grand Traverse College became Benzonia College.

Lumbering declined as the forests disappeared during the late 1800s, farming in the area was generally difficult, and the population declined.

Benzonia College struggled, lacking students or money, and it became a college prep school called Benzonia Academy in 1900.

The Catton family in Benzonia

Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan. His family came to Benzonia when his father taught at the school and, in 1906, became principal of the 40-student academy.

In 1909, Benzonia Academy's main campus building burned down, and school officials replaced it with a wooden-frame and brick-veneer building called Mills Cottage. It became the girls' dormitory, central dining hall, and home to Principal Catton's family.

Young Bruce Catton had fond memories of old men with long grey beards and wearing blue uniforms with brass buttons that took center stage each Decoration Day (aka Memorial Day) during his childhood. Catton loved the stories they spun about their Civil War days, and history became alive for him as he listened to their tales.

Catton graduated from Benzonia Academy and attended Oberlin College in 1916. His father remained principal of the academy until 1917.

Benzonia Academy closed after graduating one last class of 10 students in 1918.

Catton leaves Benzonia, finds his voice

Catton left Oberlin College to join the Navy during World War I. He worked as a newspaper reporter at the Cleveland News, the Boston Herald-American, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer before moving to Washington D.C. in the mid-1920s to work for a news syndication service. He worked for the Federal government through World War II as a director of information.

Catton wrote his first book, The War Lords of Washington, in 1948, leaving his bureaucratic job for his new career as an author.

Catton turned to the subject that sparked his imagination as a young boy, writing Mr. Lincoln's Army in 1951. It was the first of his 13 Civil War books.

Catton's next book, A Stillness at Appomattox, explored the final campaign of the war in Virginia. It was his first real commercial success, earning him the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for history.

His lyrical writing and love for telling stories of the privates, rather than the generals or simply regurgitating dry facts and figures, made Catton's histories popular beyond professional historians and academicians.

The rest of the story

Catton helped establish American Heritage magazine in 1954. He became the magazine's senior editor in 1959, remaining there until his 1978 death at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan. His gravesite is in the Benzonia Township Cemetery.

Catton wrote about his childhood in Benzonia during the 1970s in Waiting for the Morning Train.

Mills Cottage became the Mills Community House and Benzonia Public Library in 1925. It earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

If you're looking for a Wi-Fi connection as you travel in the area, you can sit on the building's spacious front porch and access the library's connection, even when the building isn't open according its website.

For the curious, the geocache we found in the park next to the building where young Bruce played Civil War is no longer there, although it remains one of our more memorable finds. It was a two-stage cache where you solved a math puzzled based on information from an historical marker about the academy. The solution led you to a micro cache hidden on the underside of a piece of tree bark about 3/4 by 1-1/2 inches in size and tacked back on the tree with a small hook.

Looking for other Midwest locations with a Civil War connection? Check out my story, Brake for Civil War history in Indiana, about a marker at the site of a Civil War training camp.

© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Thompsonville

Cheese Haus Maus and Kern's Sausages: Frankenmuth, Michigan, landmarks

I prefer to buy something local to the area where I'm traveling and something that won't take up too much room in my luggage or already overstuffed house, so some local cheese and a stick of spicy summer sausage were the perfect souvenirs of our short trip to Frankenmuth.

While most Frankenmuth visitors know about the massive Bronner's Christmas store and mega all-you-can-eat chicken dinner restaurants, the Cheese Haus maus is another hard-to-miss sight right in the heart of Frankenmuth's downtown.

I always remember that huge mouse perched on the big wedge of cheese along Main Street, so it comes as no surprise to me that to learn that the business has deep roots in the town.

Frankenmuth's Hubinger family was the first to open businesses in the small town in the mid-1840s with holdings including a mill, a cheese factory, and a grocery store. The family sold their store to Tiny Zehnder in the 1950s, and he established the Cheese Haus during that decade according to a speaker recently hosted by the town's Lions Club.

The big mouse is enough of a landmark that it is a location at Waymarking.com (waymarking is similar to geocaching, except there is no physical cache involved).

But what about the cheese?

One of the store's claims to fame is its house-made chocolate cheeses. These taste a bit like a little-less-than-sweet fudge, and although I'm more interested in cheese that tastes like cheese, I imagine the chocolate cheeses might appeal to chocolate lovers looking for a little something different.

We opted instead for a few small bricks of Michigan-made cheeses like the Frankenmuth Sharp and a mild havarti cheese flecked with bits of peppadew. We also bought a tub of a cheese/cream cheese mix called Father Bolger's blend from St. John's, Michigan, named for a priest who originally developed the mix to make as Christmas gifts for family and friends.

If you absolutely need a boot-shaped beer glass, funny German hat, or postcards, you can find those sorts of souvenirs at the rear of the store.

But I like my cheesy souvenirs to be real, well, cheese!

There is a little patio area beside the store where you can enjoy your cheese snack on a warm day or gather the kids for the obligatory Cheese Haus Maus photo.

Kern's Sausages is just a little down the street from the Cheese Haus and is also a great place to shop for a little local flavor.

This family owned business recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, and a third generation of the Kern family continues to make and sell more than thirty house-made Bavarian-style sausages at the store.

Kern's has a small selection of grocery items and many imported German specialty items in addition to its extensive sausage selection.

Tim is a summer sausage fan, and we'd heard that Kern's house-made variety was quite tasty. We took some home with us and found it to be very good and nicely spicy.

It's also fun to browse around the Kern's website to see how they make their sausages and other German specialties like Springerle cookies or brat buns. Kern's also has a Facebook page, which is worth checking out for information about local events or for store coupons.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Frankenmuth

Empire, a quintessential and quirky small northern Michigan town

We love visiting the Village of Empire, Michigan, not only because it is right in the middle of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore area and home to the national park’s headquarters and visitor center, but also because it is just one of those cool little northern Michigan small towns.

The wide Front Street running through the village looks pretty serene in this wintertime view, when about 400 year-round residents pretty much have the place to themselves, but come summer, this village about 25 miles west of Traverse City teems with tourists. Visitors come for the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and Empire events like the annual Dunegrass Festival in summer, which has a full bill of folk and bluegrass music plus displays by local artisans.

I always eagerly await Michigan’s late spring/early summer asparagus season because asparagus is one of my favorite vegetables. Several farms around Empire grow asparagus, and the little town embraces the veggie in a big way with an annual Asparagus Festival.

Producers at the MSN Travel site even took note of this quirky festival, naming it one of the ten weirdest festivals in the world last year.

I hope to get up to Empire during mid-May one of these years to attend the Asparagus Fest. The festival, now in its seventh year, features asparagus, plenty of parties, music, a parade, asparagus theme costumes, asparagus eats at restaurants and stores around town, recipe contests, and cook-offs. One area brewery even offered asparagus beer last year!

Empire also has a great free, public park on the shore of Lake Michigan. The Lake Michigan Beach Park offers an excellent view of the Empire Bluff, which you can see in these summer and winter views. The northwest winds and wide sand beach make it a great place for kite-flying in the spring, while summertime visitors like swimming in the big lake, crossing the parking lot to swim in the smaller and warmer South Bar Lake at the park, or picnicking with friends and family.

Park visitors can also learn about Empire’s history and the importance of the logging industry in the village’s early development by checking out a state historical marker at the former site of the Empire Lumber Company. Plus, geocachers can log another find at this site.

Settlers first came to Empire in the mid-1850s. The community supposedly took its name from a schooner that went aground nearby in 1865, and the vessel served as a village school that winter.

Lumbering came to Empire in a big way in 1887 when the T. Wilce Company established the Empire Lumber Company to provide hardwood for a Wilce-owned flooring business in Chicago. The lumber company quickly became one of the largest hardwood mills in Michigan, making Empire a lumbering boom town in the 1890s and early 1900s.

The village population soared to 1,000 by 1900. The last Empire lumber mill burned down by 1917, spelling the end of the village’s busy lumbering era.

In 1972, the local historians established the Empire Heritage Group to preserve the area’s past. A museum complex that includes a main building, old schoolhouse, fire house and a barn is open during the summer and early autumn.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Early northern Michigan pioneer history comes alive at Hesler home

We love visiting lighthouses and learning about their history, but visiting the little log Hesler home adjacent to the Old Mission Point Lighthouse north of Traverse City, Michigan, offers a unique opportunity to learn about the earliest pioneers in the region.

Joseph and Mary Hesler settled along the eastern shore of the Old Mission Peninsula in the mid-1850s, clearing the land of dense forest and building a simple log cabin with the timber they harvested.

The snug little cabin featured outside walls joined with modified dove-tailed joints and served as shelter for the couple until they sold it in 1866.

Joseph, a Canadian, and Mary, born in Ireland, were typical of the Irish, English, Canadian, and Scottish immigrants living and farming in the Old Mission Peninsula region by the 1860s. Their cabin was also typical of the sort of homes built in the region during that era.

I was unable to discover what happened to the Heslers after they moved from their little log home, but the cabin served as a private home, shelter for migrant workers coming to the area to pick fruit like northern Michigan’s famous cherry crops, as a school, and, intriguingly enough, as a shelter for a bull!

By the early 1990s, the little cabin was empty and slated for demolition until area residents spent several years rallying to save, restore, and move the home to a site 14 miles to the north and next to the Old Mission Point Lighthouse.

In 2001, the State of Michigan erected an historical marker telling the story of the home, which is a rare surviving example of the log homes from the early settlement of Old Mission Peninsula. Visitors can peek in the cabin’s windows or, in the warmer tourist season, look through a glass partition and listen to a recorded history of the cabin, to see how northern Michigan’s earliest pioneers lived.

The wooded area next to the lighthouse is the perfect site for the Hesler home, giving visitors a real sense of how the home might have looked tucked into the northern Michigan forest.

Families and avid geocachers might also enjoy searching for a couple easy caches at the park (one physical cache box and one virtual cache), both of which are still active as I write this story.

 

Be sure to come back to Midwest Guest later this month to learn more about the Old Mission Point Lighthouse.

 

Check out the book Traveling Through Time: A Guide to Michigan’s Historical Markers for the complete text of the Hesler home marker and to find other interesting sites marked by the State of Michigan in Grand Traverse County and the surrounding area.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Traverse City