Cache Owner heather0013, placing only one hide, has nailed the fascination of geocaching. Go ahead and choose. It will be an adventure. And it will be yours.
Our adventure lies northwest, through the Month of Falling Leaves, over land preparing for a long winter nap. We hop off of Route 33 in Bellefontaine, our geotrail taking an unexpected loop through the Logan County History Center, and all that has happened on this spot over the past 2,500 years.
In our time lapse photo, we begin with the Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian Moundbuilders, far-flung civilizations rivaling the empires of Egypt, Greece and Assyria. Slowly we see new tribes moving southward and reaching this land, assimilating or eliminating the Moundbuilders. Next, as European explorers arrive, their armies follow close behind.
Superior weaponry and number of fighters, as always, will decide this conflict.
Chiefs sign treaties that will send them westward, where tribal embers will smolder and rekindle.
Into our time lapse pour untold numbers of immigrants, eager for cheap land and new business opportunities.
Local Presbyterians, Quakers, and college students pilot the Underground Railroad through Bellefontaine. Escaping Southerners are hidden in caves, secret basement rooms, and other unknown places enroute to Canada.
While husbands entertain bounty hunters in the front yard, wives whisk escapees out the back door. With the Fugitive Slave Law, fines or jail became a reality for people of conscience fighting human trafficking.
By 1900 the railroad terminal and crew change at Bellefontaine have also arrived, with hundreds of new jobs. Raw goods and farm products traveling east cross the path of manufactured goods moving to markets west. The resources of a vast continent will spend the next 100 years enriching those who can package them.
William Orr operates a profitable lumber business in 1900. He is finally able to build his dream house. It eventually becomes a nursing home. When the History Center decides to take over the property 75 years later, it is dilapidated, and the five resident raccoons are evicted.
Inside the mansion, our tour guide hails from an Amish settlement nearby. In living color, the power of religion across this land speaks. We sense the tension between personal determination of beliefs, and submission to rule-making authorities, between the free expression of generous faith, and the tightly-held strongbox of self-enrichment.
Our time capsule jars with a final picture, of heroism in the midst of horror, never forgotten.
Ready to resume our own adventure on this land, we follow our pilot to the northwest corner of Indian Lake, to a quiet street pungent with unspoken epochs of days gone by. Leaves crunch underfoot.
And we’re ready for our next adventure.
OH Love Of Geocaching 