Johnny Appleseed's Grave is a Lie

 

Back when we weren't traveling anywhere, I got so bored one day that I made myself a map that pinpointed every single place that I thought it would be interesting to go in my home state of Indiana. I (correctly) figured that when we did start to travel again, we'd probably start more locally, and wouldn't it be handy to have all the doughnut shops, waterfalls, history museums, nature preserves, and unusual playgrounds already marked for me so that I could simply look up a location, see what's nearby, and detour to visit that, too?

As a matter of fact, it IS handy!

And that's how we four intrepid explorers, on our way to a family reunion in Ann Arbor, Michigan, found ourselves underdressed for the weather and inanely wandering down a path between a giant parking lot and a German social club:

We don't look like we know where we're going, and yet we still managed to find our way to our destination: the gravesite of Johnny Appleseed:

There's a lot about the folktale of Johnny Appleseed that's a lie. 

He wasn't itinerant, but rather had a lot of property spread out over a large area that he often traveled between.

He didn't give apple seeds away or randomly plant them, but instead planted them in orchards as nursery stock, and then sold the young trees to settlers.

He did proselytize wherever he went, but as a Swedenborgian.

And this is probably not his gravesite.

Some stories say he was buried down by the nearby river in a grave that's now unmarked and undiscovered. Other stories say he was, indeed buried in this family cemetery, the Archer Cemetery, in a grave that was also unmarked but whose location was confirmed by then-living witnesses to his funeral. 

There are even a couple of other headstones from the family cemetery still standing there:

As usual, this little side trip, meant to answer one small and not terribly interesting question--Where is Johnny Appleseed buried?--has inspired in me the desire for other moderately-related and definitely weirder side quests. Not only did I just go on a deep dive into Swedenborgianism, but now I have yet another tiny history museum to add to the map of weird places to go in Ohio that I should totally make.

And the curious little hill that Johnny Appleseed's marker stands on got me wondering if it's, in fact, a Native American mound. Researching that led me to this site with opinionated information about numerous little-known mounds in Indiana... and so obviously I had to ask my public library to buy this book for me.

If you've got littler homeschoolers, I'd say keep them away from the Nephilim speculation, ahem. Instead, might I suggest an autumn unit study or Midwest geography study that includes Johnny Appleseed, culminating in a field trip to his disputed gravesite, a day trip to an apple orchard, and then a following week full of all the apple crafts and activities?

Add the Swedenborgianism to your ongoing comparative religions study, of course.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Following the Garfield Trail

I guess this post just happens to be a Throwback Thursday, because it turns out that with all the travel and fun that we had last summer, I never got around to telling you about the day trip that we took up north to follow the Garfield Trail!

Jim Davis grew up a few hours north of us, in Marion, Indiana, and the county where he grew up now sports a bunch of giant, adorable, themed Garfield statues that are meant to show off their various tourist hot spots and civic structures. The kids have looooooved Garfield forever, so the Garfield Trail has always been on my radar, but last year they started offering a Girl Scout fun patch for Girl Scouts who hit the trail.

Y'all know how I feel about fun patches.

So late last summer we finagled a time when we didn't have anything pressing on our agenda, when at least one car was more-or-less functioning, when my partner consented to come with us, and we hit the Garfield Trail!

This one is James Dean-themed, because he was ALSO born in Marion, Indiana, and is outside the Fairmount Historical Museum:

We didn't actually go into any of these places, likely defeating the entire purpose of installing the statues, because we brought Luna, who loved every second of the driving and getting into and out of the car and running around and posing for photos.

We also did some geocaching, and the older kid, who is the best ever at finding kindness rocks, FOUND YET ANOTHER KINDNESS ROCK!

We make plenty of our own kindness rocks to hide, so when we find one that we love, we happily keep it. 

Here's a little more James Dean for you:

THIS is the best reason to go on any random day trip--do you know how long it's been since we've seen a genuine playground merry-go-round?!?

 And a legitimately METAL outdoor slide, the exact same kind that my partner and I both burned our thighs on as kids a country apart?

Another worthwhile experience to hand down to the next generation:

Firefighter Garfield lives outside the Jonesboro City Hall:

Speedking Garfield is outside of Swayzee Elementary School:

We were apparently NOT supposed to climb up and pose with him--oops!

But to be fair, the warning sign isn't terribly visible if you come at the statue from the other direction:

My favorite things on this trail turned out not to be the actual Garfield statues, but the Garfield theming that abounded in these places, unrelated to the official Garfield Trail:

Here's College Bound Garfield, at the Sweetser Switch Trail and Depot:

This is Duffer Garfield, at the Arbor Trace Golf Club. It's the only one that Luna couldn't visit--humph!

Fit for Life Garfield in Matter Park was by far our favorite--

--because Matter Park is AMAZING! It's a HUGE park, especially for the area, with playgrounds and gardens and this enchanting children's garden that both kids fell in love with:

The children's garden contained actual edibles, with an invitation to pick something if it was ripe and you wanted to eat it. What an awesome concept for a public park!

Dr. Garfield lives outside the Marion General Hospital:

A couple of the statues were off-exhibit or inaccessible. We tried, anyway!

Okay, this might actually be my favorite: British Soldier Garfield, outside Payne's Restaurant:

I don't really understand why there is a restaurant serving authentic British cuisine out in the middle of the farmland, but I SUPER want to go eat there... you know, sometime when I don't have a doggy along as a dining partner.

Instead, we ate something more dog-friendly:

Ice cream!

Scream for Ice Cream Garfield, outside of Ivanhoe's Restaurant, was our final stop on purpose, so that we could order a bunch of milkshakes to go and then eat them as we started driving home.

The day on the trail wasn't completely what I'd expected--other than the Garfields outside of restaurants, there wasn't really any tourist infrastructure surrounding the statues, and most of the places where we went, other than those two restaurants and the park, were VERY sleepy little spots. We spent a lot of time driving down endless country roads with endless farms on either side; it was good for the kids to see both examples of the typical Indiana environment, since our town is the most un-Indiana place actually IN Indiana, and examples of the environment that Jim Davis grew up in, that color his comics. Whenever Jon talks about his childhood back home on the farmJon talks about his childhood back home on the farm, he's speaking about HERE, right here where we were driving, with the basketball hoops on the barn doors and the chickens and the rusted tractors and the acres of crops with nothing else to see to the horizon.

So even though it wasn't what I'd expected, it was very worth it to see. You don't have to always write what you know, of course, but it's useful to see, even for children, that your background colors what you become, and seeing the background of a comic creator, even just in the background of what we're intended to be seeing, is a valuable and accessible experience for a kid.

Especially when there's ice cream at the end!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Dinosaur Summer

We love dinosaurs around here, did you know? My kiddos' obsession colors every aspect of our days together, from the big, such as the little kid's AWESOME picture of a dinosaur that she drew yesterday--

--to the small: see the dinos on the big kid's jammies?

We've got some awesome dino-lovin' activities planned for this summer. We'll be practically in the front row for the Walking With Dinosaurs Live show when it comes near us in July (we're having to forgo our traditional huge summer birthday bash to afford the tickets, which are OUTRAGEOUS, but it's going to be worth the budget re-allocation, I know), and do not worry, I've already mapped out the locations of the dinosaur museums that we can visit on our June trip to Wisconsin--the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, and the Field Museum in Chicago, likely. Wisconsin is light on dinosaur museums because it doesn't have a fossil history because dinosaurs never lived there because it was covered in water during prehistoric times; this is what you get to learn when your children are obsessed with dinosaurs.

We'll also have the time and the nice weather to do some other dino activities that require more time than the big kid's three-hour daily preschool would allow (three hours doesn't seem that long while I'm living it, but I have to plan my whole damn day around it!). Whenever we can wrangle my partner (I'm begging him to ask for flex-time at work this summer. I really want him to work four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, and since he's a designer, he actually could use the extra time at work in the evenings, no phone calls, no visitors to his cubby, to focus on his designs), we're going to make measurements on the basketball court over at our neighborhood park and then draw life-size dinosaurs in chalk (this Smithsonian handbook on dinosaurs is our most precious family resource!), and I also want to score a load of helium balloons on some calm day and use them to measure out dinosaur heights in the park--ooh, I'll also need a lot of string.

We go creek-stomping around here a lot, and the kids enjoy searching for geodes and crinoid fossils (the big kid claims that she is "the best fossil hunter out of all my friends," and I have to say that it's probably true), so depending on how interested they are, it would be fun to add on more of that into our dino activities. Where we live in Indiana is actually a superb place to explore for fossils--a shallow prehistoric sea left lots of little ocean critter fossils, and a glacier later on the same site kept the bedrock from being too covered with subsequent layers of earth, so now you can easily fossil hunt (where it's legal) in most creeks, road cuts, and limestone quarries (but not caves! All the Indiana caves and sinkholes are closed to the public this year in hopes of stopping White Nose Syndrome from spreading. Sucks).

Perhaps we could even find a brachoid!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!