| Summary: | (13) The stages started out of Jamestown over the 1st Ave. South bridge, known then as the Mill bridge and from the top of. the south bluff took a course for the mouth of Beaver Creek where the postoffice of E. A. Tarbell was located 1881, then it ran on the west side of the river to Grand Rapids. This trail later crossed the Dewey bridge, ran southeast up the bluff near the Fisher home and almost straight southeast past old Homer No. 3 school, then on past the northeast comer of Danners treeclaim and to Ypsilanti, where Wm. H. Colby established P.O. 1882. Chas. Avis was one of the drivers on the Concord stage that was used on the triweekly run, older pupils of No. 3 can remember the four horse stage passing the - old school house in those days. The teacher used to send a pupil out to flag the stage and start off letters to her "beau" and avoid having such messages pass thru the hands of curious local people. One of the old coaches of the Benjamin line was abandoned at the Glaspel farm in the edge of Jamestown and fell to pieces, Harry Miller, a garage man, resurrected it and had it rebuilt and it was on display a number of years but it was finally lost to the community in 1949 when some Minnesota parties secured it and shipped it away. A bit of this old stage road still shows in the school house yard where old No. 3 stood on the northwest corner of section 27; overgrown with grass and weeds but still plain to those of us who knew where to look. It will probably out last the few old timers who saw it in the days when the bright painted stage rolled and rattled past in a cloud of dust. With the establishment of the Bush and Corwin farm just south of Homer, in the spring of 1879, a road was laid out to Jamestown. It ran north two miles from the main set of buildings, to the southeast corner of section 29; diagonally across the east half of that section to the Wrights buildings, to the center of the section (20) thence northwest to the section corner and north to the Dewey bridge. This was a well traveled road for many years and was used by people traveling from the south, Adrian, Montpelier and settlers along the way. This Montpelier trail crossed open prairie much of the way from the top of the Montpelier bluff, northwest past Chas. Pauls place and joined the Corwin road near the corner of section 29. In the late eighties and the nineties hundreds of settlers from the older states, Iowa, southern Minnesota and South Dakota trailed past; on this road looking for the Mouse riverloop. All sorts of vehicles; prairie schooners, open wagons, buck boards, or horseback; driving herds of cattle and horses, and trailing farm machinery. Most of them watered at the Wrights well which was close to the road and many camped nearby over night; some wanted horse feed, milk for babies, vegetables, or information about roads and land. All that is past now, a closed chapter in the history of Homer. The land is closely cultivated and the trails that cut cross country the shortest distances are plowed up, travelers now follow section lines on graded and graveled roads. Scanned with a Zeutschel Zeta book scanner at 300 dpi. Edited with Multi-Page TIFF Editor.
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