Midwest Guest

Discover Battle of Lake Erie Bicentennial Celebration at Discovering Ohio

Ohio's northern lakeshore becomes a hot spot for living history this summer as celebrations leading up to the 200th anniversary of Commodore Oliver Perry's great victory at the Battle of Lake Erie kick into high gear this spring and summer.

Perry's great naval victory in September of 1813 was a major battle in the war and a turning point in the war for Americans as they gained control of Lake Erie.

Check out my latest story at the Ohio Tourism Division's Discovering Ohio blog this month, Battle of Lake Erie Bicentennial Celebration, the first of a two-part preview of some of the more interesting events planned to celebrate this historical bicentennial.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Mysteries of the twin bridges in Danville, Indiana

I heard about a haunted bridge in Danville, Indiana, and although we were only in town for one evening, we managed to grab a few minutes just as the sun began to set to go find the bridge.

We found the huge, slightly Gothic-looking railroad bridge, but subsequent research leaves me a bit mystified about the bridge’s story.

We found the bridge as the light began to fade that evening, but we couldn’t immediately find a place to park by the bridge so I could take photos. Tim dropped me off alongside of the curving road that ran underneath the bridge so I take some photos as he drove around in a couple of circles (yes, that’s my little yellow Focus you see Tim driving underneath the bridge as he wonders where I’ve gone!)

This bridge dates from 1906, according to a date that I spotted carved into the bridge itself.

This impressive arched bridge wasn’t the first bridge at this site, though.

The Bridge Hunter site, which is one of my go-to sites when I research a bridge’s history, reports that the original bridge here was one of two metal truss bridges built in the 1880s.

Two metal bridges, one atop the other, were the “twin bridges” until this cement bridge replaced the upper-level metal bridge in 1906.

The lower-level metal bridge, a Baltimore truss bridge built in 1886, still exists as a pedestrian bridge. The now-missing, upper-level Pratt truss bridge was built in 1883.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to find the existing metal bridge before it got dark and Tim tired of driving around in circles.

So, these were the “twin bridges”…or were they?

Several sources that say the concrete bridge’s “twin” may be another concrete railroad bridge in nearby Avon.

This was the first of many disagreements among sources about these bridges that I found. The stories, fittingly enough, become even more hazy as you begin to look at reports of the bridges’ hauntings.

One story concerns Dad Jones, a worker who sources seem to agree met his death while working on a concrete railroad bridge. Jones, variously described as an Irish immigrant or an African-American man, was pouring cement into a wooden frame for one of the bridges pillars when he fell (or as one source claimed, drunkenly stumbled) into the cement and sank to his death in the drying concrete.

Depending on the source, no one could, or would, retrieve Jones’ body from the cement pillar.

Sources placed Jones at the bridge in these photos, another concrete bridge in Danville that served an interurban line until 1930 (now only existing in ruins), or the concrete railroad bridge in Avon.

The stories say that locals hear Jones some nights pounding on the bridge, screaming and begging for help. Or maybe it’s a ghostly Jones who others see wandering in the woods around the ruins of the interurban tracks—especially when there is a full moon.

There’s more!

Another story involves a woman walking along the tracks with a baby. She either jumped from the bridge with the baby or threw the baby off the bridge before jumping to her death when startled by an approaching train.

But did the story occur at Danville’s concrete bridge, or at the bridge in Avon?

A Chinese railroad worker or a boy returning from a late-night date also may have jumped or fell from one of the two bridges.

There are plenty of stories about unexplained muddy figures jumping into the road, unexplained crying or screaming, and ghostly figures along the railroad tracks flagging down oncoming trains in conjunction with this legend.

One of the more easily verifiable stories about tragedy at the big concrete bridge in Danville involves the death of a young teen-aged girl who slipped to her death from the span in 2004.

I can usually decide which is the most plausible of conflicting accounts, but the story of the big concrete bridge, a.k.a. the West Fork White Lick Creek Railroad Bridge, certainly has me flummoxed.

The West Fork White Lick Creek Railroad Bridge is an open-spandrel bridge with concrete arches. The span, built in 1906 for the Big Four Railroad on a line just southeast of Danville near present-day Highway 36, is 275-feet-long.

The bridge, with its crumbling concrete, makes me wonder if, like definitive answers to its mysteries, will someday also be lost to history.

Want to learn more about Danville and see some historic photos of the West Fork White Lick Creek Bridge? Check out Danville (Images of America) by Jeffrey Baldwin and the Hendricks County Historical Society.  

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Djehutymose seeks his mummy in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Djehutymose, son of Nespakhered and Temple of Horus priest, died somewhere between 684 and 525 B.C., but his spirit still holds court on Facebook these days.

The Mummy Djehutymose Facebook page is a project of the Kelsey Museum of Archeology at the University of Michigan, which displays Djehutymose’s coffin while his online persona seeks his missing mummy.

Djehutymose’s coffin is just one of the museum’s Egyptian treasures that seemed to fascinate visitors young and old when we visited the Kelsey on recent weekday afternoon.

There are many interesting vintage buildings along Ann Arbor’s South State Street in the University of Michigan’s main campus area, but I’ve always particularly loved the quirky look of the Kelsey Museum. The museum’s building is a late-nineteenth-century house constructed of random-cut fieldstone and adorned with a three-story turret capped with a conical roof.

The Romanesque-style building, designed as home for one of the earliest student Christian associations in the country bears the name of lumber baron John S. Newberry. Newberry’s widow Helen funded $18,000 of the building’s $40,000 construction costs in 1888-1891, and the building still bears the Newberry name on its façade.

Meanwhile, Francis W. Kelsey, a long-time professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, had been amassing an impressive collection of Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquities since the 1890s. Professor Kelsey believed that participating in pioneering archeological digs and viewing the collection’s treasures were among the best ways for students to learn about ancient culture, but his passion for collecting meant the University needed more space to house it.

By 1921, the University rented Newberry Hall for classroom space and, by the end of the 1920s, began moving the archeological collection into the building.

The University bought Newberry Hall in 1937.

Kelsey’s collection became the foundation of the archeological museum that U of M eventually named for him in 1953.

The collection and offerings like educational programs for children and adults, research, and support of fieldwork continued to grow over the years.

In 2009, Edwin and Mary Meader donated $8 million to the University to fund a 20,000-square-foot addition to the museum to the back of the original Newberry Hall, providing a climate-controlled environment for display area, research and storage.

The University named the new wing for Mary Meader’s grandfather, the noted western Michigan pharmacist William E. Upjohn.

The new addition means the museum now publically displays 1,300 to 2,000 artifacts, many more than the 200 to 300 items on display in just the original building. That is still just a fraction of the nearly 100,000 artifacts in the museum’s collections.

The museum plans to display several hundred additional items in open storage cabinets on the first floor, and one family consisting of mom and several young explorers there when we visited found that several of the drawers were already stocked with small artifacts for viewing.

The collection focuses on Greek, Egyptian, Near Eastern and Roman artifacts with individual display cases and areas highlighting distinct cultures, along with displays that show the interconnections between ancient people and cultures.

I found the large variety of artifacts illustrating the daily lives of people among the most interesting things on display.

Items like jewelry, pottery, toys, lamps, coins, tools, jugs and more gave me a real feeling for how people lived during ancient times.

The museum has many funerary objects like mummies and items left as offerings in tombs (like a mummified cat!) that also gave me a look at the way those same people viewed death as well.

The second floor of the Upjohn wing focuses on Roman life and displays a nearly life-size watercolor replica of wall frescos from the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii.

Museum hours are 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The museum closes on Mondays and for University of Michigan holidays.

Admission is free, although donations are welcome.

Can’t get to the Kelsey Archeological Museum in person? The museum has a strong online presence.

Check out an online gallery of cuneiform tablets with texts predating 2000 B.C., diaries of ongoing archeological digs, and the museum’s Tumbler account, which features news and articles about curators’ favorite artifacts online.

You can, of course, visit Djehutymose’s Facebook and Twitter feed, as well as the Kelsey Museum’s active Twitter feed and Facebook page.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

School days in Pittsboro, Indiana

It is 1892. Indiana's Benjamin Harrison sits in the White House as President of the United States, Danville's own Ira Chase is the Indiana governor and Miss Phoebe presides over classes at the Pittsboro One Room School as its schoolmarm.

Miss Phoebe, played by retired Hendricks County educator Doris Martin, is one of five trained schoolmarms helping grade-school classes and community groups recreate a typical late-nineteenth-century school day at the lovingly restored one-room school house behind present-day Pittsboro Elementary School about 20 miles west of Indianapolis. The schoolmarms include Martin, Nancy Hughes, Darla Franklin, Martha Hughes and Lois Hoffman.

“As a retired elementary school teacher of 32 years, I love being a schoolmarm because, first of all, it keeps me with the children and adults, but I no longer have to grade papers,” said Martin in a recent email to me. “Secondly, l also love the history that we teach each day.”

The little one-room school house is most often full of eager scholars for spring and fall school field trips, but the school is available year round for groups to schedule a visit. We were lucky enough to get a private tour of this vintage school one day late last fall with Martin who lives near the school.

The little building started life in 1883 as a frame building known as the Caledonia School. It later became the Pittsboro One-Room School #3. Teachers held classes there for students from first through eighth grade until 1920.

The school then sat in a lonely cornfield, abandoned and deteriorating, for nearly 80 years.

It saw use as a place for a local farmer to store his grain, and he passed it down through several generations of his family. The building was in bad shape in the 1990s when then-owners Frank and Dorothy McClung tried to find new owners for the little building that would appreciate its history as a school.

The cost of moving the school discouraged some buyers, but the North West Hendricks School Corporation finally purchased the building for $1 from the McClungs and community leaders formed the One Room School Committee to raise money to move the school to a new site and to repair, renovate and restore the building.

The group raised $50,000 to move the school nearly 5 miles to the elementary school campus in 1997. The group obtained a grant for $100,000 and volunteers set to work, helping to complete the building's restoration in 2000.

One Room School Board member Judy Pingel continues to oversee furnishing the building with historically appropriate desks, maps, photos of former students and accessories like a school bell and books once belonging to Ruth Case, the teacher at the Pittsboro One Room School in 1911-12.

Doris Martin (a.k.a. "Miss Phoebe") with one of the school's vintage maps

Since the school's opening as a living history site in 2000, over 22,000 scholars have signed on to play the roles of students studying their McGuffey readers, the standard text book for most students of the late nineteenth century, and studying classic subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, penmanship, geography, elocution (public speaking), physiology (natural science), local Hendricks County history and orthography (spelling).

Martin showed us some late-nineteenth-century final exams for eighth graders, which were surprisingly difficult. I wondered real-life 1892 teachers would make of the skills of modern-day students, especially in subjects like penmanship now that many schools are debating whether to teach cursive writing at all these days!

“We are finding that many classes who visit the One Room School can no longer read the cursive writing that we have on our boards,” said Martin when I asked her that question.

Martin also noted that many visitors are surprised to learn that the student body at the school in 1892 might include young men as old as 20 still trying to complete eighth grade because they could only attend school a few weeks each year when they didn’t have to work on the farm. The schoolmarms of that era might be a few years younger than their oldest students.

The Pittsboro program for children typically meets the State Social Studies Standards for grades 3 and 4, so many of the program participants are third- and fourth-graders.

Students get nametags and assume the identity of children who actually attended the school in 1911, so they answer to the names of those students for the day.

The children arrive at school in the morning for a full school day that includes morning exercises like saying the Pledge, answering roll call and learning the school rules.

The students break for lunch and recess featuring typical schoolyard games from 1892such as tag-and-chase games like Drop the Handkerchief or Fox and Geese.

One-room schoolmarms like "Miss Phoebe" are also role-playing, so they don't recognize references to, or answer questions about, events that happened after 1892.

Students are encouraged to help enhance their living history experience by wearing period-appropriate clothing and bringing a box lunch prepared as it might have been in 1892 (with no plastic water bottles, cans, aluminum foil or plastic wrap).

Need a cup for water? The schoolmarm will show you how to make your own cup from a sheet of paper!

The school has a supply of plain muslin shirts for the boys and pinafores for the girls that they can wear over their clothes.

Martin told us that the children especially like learning about the future of the students they play at the end of the day. Meanwhile, some adults who participate in the program enjoy it because they have their own fond memories of going to a one-room school as children.

“We get their stories that sometimes we can incorporate into our program,” said Martin of those former students of one-room schools.

Visit the Pittsboro One Room School site for more information or contact Martin via email at [email protected] for information about scheduling a visit to the school.

Thanks to the Hendricks County Convention and Visitors Bureau for  sponsoring my visit to Hendricks County, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Hendricks County attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Read all about it!

The April edition of Midwest Guest's every-other-month email newsletter hit inboxes yesterday.

This issue features links to a couple of freebie tourist guides and resources, as well as the latest news about Midwest Guest articles elsewhere on the Web and were Tim and I plan to travel in coming months.

Michigan winery news link and more in my latest newsletter!

Missed it? You can sign up for future issues here. The next edition comes out in June.

There is also a link which allows you to view this month's edition on the upper left-hand corner of the subscription sign-up form.

This is my fifth edition of the Midwest Guest email newsletter, and I'm always looking for ways to make it more useful and interesting for readers while keeping it quick and easy to scan.

Bouquets? Brickbats? You can always drop me a line here or find me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Plymouth, Michigan: Red Ryder rifles, the Phoenix Mill, a vintage Packard and more

We recently joined about 150 people strolling along a re-created late-nineteenth-century street near downtown Plymouth, Michigan.

The occasion? A reception for public historians and history enthusiasts attending a local history conference hosted by the Historical Society of Michigan and a chance to learn about the history of a Michigan town whose beginnings predate Michigan's designation as a state in 1837.

We regularly drive out to Plymouth to see Whalers hockey games, but this was our first time visiting this museum about 25 miles west of downtown Detroit.

I discovered that downtown Plymouth escaped the fate of going through time as Podunk, the name the area's original settlers' used for what is now Plymouth's charming little downtown. They called the north end of town Joppa, but met in 1827 to consider a new name for the area.

There was a strong interest in China among many people in the area during the 1820s , so t he group considered calling the town Peking (which explains the name of the nearby city of Canton, Michigan). The name LeRoy was the group's the first choice, but another Michigan town already claimed that name. The second-choice name of Plymouth became the town's new name, honoring the ancestry of many of settlers who immigrated to the area from Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Cigar making and automobile manufacturing were among industries that operated in Plymouth during the early 1900s-- industries that also flourished in many other Michigan towns at the time.

Other notable industries fueling Plymouth's development included the Phoenix Mill, a plant manufacturing parts for Ford's River Rouge Plant in Detroit that operated from 1922 until 1948, and the Daisy Air Rifle Company, which opened during the 1880s and established Plymouth as the "BB Gun Capital of the World".

The museum dedicates permanent exhibits to these companies.

A placard at the Phoenix Mill exhibit says that it was one of a group of manufacturing plants that Henry Ford established at former mill sites along on the Rouge River to use water power to produce car parts. Phoenix Mill was unique because it only employed women. The women earned the same $5 per day that Ford offered male workers at the Ford Motor Company, but they had stricter rules that they must be singles and required them to wear dresses, stockings and high heels to work.

Daisy Company began as the Plymouth Iron Windmill Company began giving away BB guns as a premium to customers purchasing windmills during the 1880s. It was also home to the fictional Red Ryder BB gun model that Ralphie repeatedly asked for during the movie, A Christmas Story. Daisy moved to Arkansas in 1958. A condominium complex now sits at the site of the former factory.

The museum also has a notable collection of memorabilia relating to President Abraham Lincoln. The collection includes wax figures of the president and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, as well as items like a bearded life mask of Lincoln, a lock of his hair and a large banner for the 1860 presidential campaign.

The Plymouth Historical Society organized in 1948 and established a small museum.

In 1971, Margaret Dunning donated $100,000 to finance a 15,000-square-foot building when the museum needed larger quarters.

Dunning donated $1 million in 1998 to build a 9,800-square-foot two-story addition to the museum.

Dunning is a fascinating woman according to what I read online. She grew up on her family's potato farm as a neighbor to Henry Ford in nearby Redford. The family moved to Plymouth after the death of Margaret's father.

Dunning worked briefly at the Phoenix Mill plant as a young woman, drove a Red Cross motor pool truck during World War II and returned to Plymouth after the war for a career in banking and as the owner of a local department store.

She still lives in the home in Plymouth where she moved at the age of 13.

Dunning, a life-long car buff, owns the 1930 Packard 740 roadster she bought in 1949 and still occasionally drives the car. Changing the car's oil and spark plugs? Dunning still reportedly does that as well!

Museum hours are 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $5 for adults and $2 for students ages 6 to 17.

Want to learn more about Plymouth, Michigan? Check out Plymouth's First Century: Innovators and Industry by Elizabeth Kerstens, Plymouth (Then and Now) by Brian Vincent Hill and the Plymouth Historical Society or Legendary Locals of Plymouth by Leis Dauzet-Miller.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Follow the North Star at Conner Prairie

It's dark. It's cold. It's rainy.

The terrain is unfamiliar, gunshots ring through the night, and menacing figures unleash a fusillade of demands and insults at me as I kneel in the mud.

It's 1836. I'm a runaway slave, and I'm following the North Star in hopes of finding my freedom.

Public history institutions and publications downplayed or simply ignored the subject of slavery for many years, but Conner Prairie, an interactive history park near Indianapolis, stages its innovative and immersive Follow the North Star program each November and April to give participants a more personal look at the issue and the questions it still raises today.

Photo: Courtesy of Conner Prairie

Historians at Conner Prairie warn visitors up front that their acclaimed Follow the North Star program is not for everyone.

We became part of the Follow the North Star experience last November on a cold night after a rainy day that left the trail in Conner Prairie's wooded area wet and muddy.

Our group filed into an auditorium, and a member of Conner Prairie's staff gave us a quick preview of what to expect.

One woman nervously asked if she could just "observe" the program after a warning that we might experience people shouting at us and demanding that we follow orders. The staff member told "The Observer" that we needed to follow instructions as a group throughout the experience, but we could opt out of the direct verbal confrontations. The staffer passed out white strips of cloth, telling us that if we felt the experience got too intense, we could use the cloth as a headband so the re-enactors would refrain from addressing us directly.

The mood grew somber as we silently boarded a trolley to take us to the outdoor area where we would experience the program.

We arrived at our destination and walked a short distance into the woods.

Suddenly, it was 1836 and it was on.

Our "master" immediately separated the group into "bucks" and "breeders" (men and women), shouting demands and insults the whole time.

We were lazy, dirty, thieving, and stupid. We were his property. We were not to, under any circumstance, impair his ability to get top dollar for us by being insolent or uncooperative.

We could not look a white person directly in the eye. We were not to speak unless spoken to. We were to do as we were told, and to be quick about it.

Photo: Courtesy of Conner Prairie

It mattered little if you didn't answer quickly enough, didn't give the answers the questioners wanted to hear, or didn't answer at all. The result was the same: more verbal abuse.

I felt an initial shock as I heard the volley of rapid-fire insults and demands. I reminded myself that the re-enactors could not touch, physically harm or kill me, but it was still difficult to escape the desire to cry or flee.

I saw that "The Observer" and the three young women accompanying her wasted no time in donning their white headbands. I quickly sidled away from them and tried to keep my distance from them for the rest of the trip lest I become the sole target of insults at any given time.

The slavers put us to work moving pieces of wood from one pile to another as they insulted us, threatened us and loudly discussed what they might do to us.

Suddenly, the slavers left us alone and someone frantically whispered, "Let's go!"

The group quickly moved through the night and encountered people who either helped or hindered our journey to our hoped-for freedom.

Photo: Courtesy of Conner Prairie

Our most unpleasant stop occurred as a couple of slave catchers found us along the road. They berated and threatened us, blaming us for causing them to lose their jobs. This resonated with me as I thought about the fact that you hear many of the same sorts of arguments as an excuse for discrimination against particular groups even today.

The slave catchers then told us to stay put as they threatened to find a rope and hang us with it.

We again slipped away into the night and the deep woods.

We encountered a woman who had gained her freedom and she invited us to share the warmth of her bonfire in the woods.

Most of the group accepted the woman's story as true, but by now, I was feeling a deep paranoia and didn't quite trust the woman in the woods.

We followed the woman's instructions as we visited the home of a Quaker family. I still felt distrustful and uncomfortable as the Quakers offered us a bit of food and shelter as they directed us to our next stop. I didn't want to take the food and wanted to quickly be on my way.

Our journey came to an end as we encountered a fortune teller who told some of us our fate.

Tim learned that he escaped his owners, who recaptured and branded him before he finally escaped for good on his second flight to freedom.

To my great joy, I learned that I made it to freedom in Cass County, Michigan, where I lived the rest of my life.

We met with a staff member back at Conner Prairie's main building for a debriefing session.

During the session, I learned that my distrust in the woman in the woods wasn't necessarily simply paranoia as some African Americans, for the sake of their own survival, lured runaways into trusting them before turning them in to slave catchers.

The whole 90-minute experience left me emotionally and physically spent. It is especially sobering to realize that fugitive slaves spent months, or even years, on the run and that there were no guarantees that the journey would not end in death...or worse.

Photo: Courtesy of Conner Prairie

Conner Prairie began offering Follow the North Star in the late 1990s, drawing some 60,000 participants in the program over the years. It represents some of the shift in dealing with the subject of slavery in public history in recent years, but it's still a relatively rare way of addressing the subject in public history institutions.

Conner Prairie's Follow the North Star program runs on select weekends each April and November.  Reservations are required and participants must be 12 or older. The program is definitely not appropriate for younger children, and I would suggest that participants be prepared to fully participate in order to get the most benefit from the experience. Admission is $20.

The Discomfort Zone: Reenacting Slavery at Conner Prairie from the Organization of American Historians' OAH Magazine of History has a short history of the Follow the North Star program, examples of other efforts to deal with emotionally-charged topics at public institutions, and discussion of the pros and cons of such approaches.

Check out Fleeing for Freedom: Stories of the Underground Railroad as Told by Levi Coffin and William Still, edited by Willene Hendrick and George Hendrick. Levi Coffin, who we encountered as part of the Quaker family that helped us during our Follow the North Star experience, was extremely important in the Underground Railroad network in Indiana and Ohio. We also heard the story of his Underground Railroad activity in Cincinnati when we visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center a few years ago.

Thanks to the Hamilton County Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Hamilton County, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Hamilton County attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Discover Cleveland's King Bridges at Discovering Ohio

Everyone knows that I love historic bridges!

Zenas King (no relation) established a bridge company in Cleveland, Ohio, that built thousands of bridges across the county during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The King Bridge Company also transformed what started as a small group of craft businesses in the early 1800s into a national manufacturing industry that fed on the demand for a rapidly growing transportation network during America's great westward expansion.

Check out my latest story at the Ohio Tourism Division's Discovering Ohio blog this month, King of the Nation's 19th-Century Bridge Builders.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: Revisiting the historic courthouse in Lapeer, Michigan

Regular Midwest Guest readers know that I love old county courthouses. The buildings and the things a county chooses to display on their courthouse lawns often tell visitors a lot about the culture and history of a particular place.

We found this to be true when we recently visited the historic courthouse in Lapeer, Michigan, which is in the county just north of my home county of Oakland.

Oakland County's courthouse is sprawling a mid-twentieth-century building that lacks the real sense of history I can see and feel by visiting Lapeer's vintage 1840s court building with its golden dome.

Want to learn more about Lapeer's history and its courthouse? Check out my recent story here about the Historic courthouse in Lapeer, Michigan, or check out The Lapeer Area (Images of America) by Catherine Ulrich Brakefield.

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 2013 All rights reserved

Monon Greenway offers major route through Carmel, Indiana

Living near Detroit, I'm especially aware of our lack of alternatives to driving a car to get around town, and I love seeing effort by cities to be more pedestrian-friendly and offer more non-automotive transportation options.

So, I became curious when I spotted signs for the Monon Greenway through Carmel, Indiana and saw the number of folks using that city's rail-to-trail system to get around town, even during a couple of dreary and rainy November days when we last visited that city.

I discovered that Carmel's Monon Greenway was just part of a larger system of popular walking, hiking, biking and rollerblading trails in and around Indianapolis.

The original Monon Railroad began in 1853 as a transportation system for Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville that eventually included 300 miles of track running between Lake Michigan and the Ohio River. The railroad's main lines formed an "X" over Indiana, with its major intersection at the town of Monon, Indiana.

The name of Monon came from a Potawatomi word, "monong", that meant "swift running". Seems like a great name for a trail to me!

The so-called Hoosier Railroad Line that ran through the area carried troops, ammunition, food, fuel, medicine and other supplies to Union soldiers during the Civil War and later provided transportation to Indiana's limestone industry.

The railroad eventually fell into disuse and the company abandoned the rail line in 1987.

The idea of turning the rail system into a trail system in the Indianapolis caught the imagination of alternative transportation activists and 1999 saw the first ten miles of the Monon Trail completed.

The City of Carmel established a connection to the Monon Trail with the completion of its own 5.2-mile Monon Greenway in 2001-2002.

The Monon Trail, Monon Greenway and a short trail extension into Westerfield completed in 2008 is a 16.7-mile trail system that draws 1.3 million bicyclists and pedestrians every year, with commuters accounting for 20 percent of all of those trips.

The Monon Greenway runs directly through Carmel's City Center with its Arts and Design District and offers easy access to a variety of schools, parks, restaurants, businesses and attractions like Carmel Center for the Performing Arts and a historical museum in the railroad's former depot. Greenway users can link into the larger Monon system to travel to Indianapolis itself and places like the State Fairgrounds and the Indianapolis Art Center.

We spotted the Greenway as it ran alongside residential areas, Bub's Cafe, the Children's Art Gallery and many of the life-like John Seward Johnson sculptures in Carmel.

The city of Carmel owns the Monon Greenway and the Carmel Clay Parks & Recreation Department maintains and manages the asphalt trail.

The 10' to 15' wide trail easily accommodates two-way traffic and is accessible to those using wheelchairs. It considered a major route through town and has posted speed limits not exceeding 20 m.p.h. It is open from dawn until dusk and dog owners may bring along their leashed pets.

Parking is available south of Carmel's Main Street and at the 96th Street trailhead.

Work continues along the Greenway with improvements like the construction of an overpass at Carmel Drive to provide trail users with as few intersections with automotive traffic as possible, but it seems investments like this $3,300,000 project are worthwhile as Carmel realized the benefit of other investments made within six blocks of the Greenway.

You can easily find maps and apps about the Greenway online marked with the location of businesses, services and amenities along the trail like parks and restrooms.

Thanks to the Hamilton County Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Hamilton County, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Hamilton County attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved