7/22 - Cedar Springs

This post originally was written only for family since nothing happened which would be of interest to anyone else, but I've decided it put it on the blog anyway.  I’m kicking myself now for not taking any pictures of our get-togethers with Tim and Bonnie but at least we have one picture I took of them on our Soo Locks tour last weekend.

Tim and Bonnie Marvin – Tim and Jim are third cousins.

Tim and I met three years ago via Ancestry.com and have been emailing ever since in our search for the roots of our Smith clan.  It was great that they were able to come to the reunion so we could meet in person.  They live in Grand Rapids, 20 miles south of our campground in Cedar Springs, so we’ve been able to see them three times while we’ve been here.  Tim is has an encyclopedic knowledge of this area having grown up in and around Cedar Springs.  He’s also become obsessed with family history and has found far more information than I would ever have dug up on my own.  The two of us are still doing our best to find Edward Smith, the first one of our Smith line to come from England just before the Revolution. 

We got here in time Wednesday to go to the little Cedar Springs Historical Society Museum but we weren’t successful at finding any previously unknown information.  They’re only open one afternoon a week and then they took up most of that afternoon with a meeting during which they closed the place.  Tim knows the museum well so I trust he has already found everything there that’s worth finding.  Tim and Bonnie picked us up later and drove us all over the area to see the farm where Grandpa Smith grew up, two cemeteries where various relatives were buried, and other family landmarks. 

This area is very easy to find your way around in since it’s fairly flat and the roads are set up in squares which are broken only by the many little lakes scattered around.  We found our way back to the farm and the cemeteries on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  I’ve been taking pictures of gravestones for three days which no doubt bored Jim to tears but he patiently sat in the truck and read while I searched for relatives.  Gravestones are extremely helpful in piecing information together so it was well worth the effort.

This is the 20-acre farm which was owned by Jim’s great-grandparents Sam and Mary Smith.  It’s where they were living when Grandpa Smith was born so it’s where he spent his childhood.  Tim’s great-grandfather was Israel Eugene Smith, Sam’s brother, who also owned land nearby.

Great-great-grandfather Israel Chapin Smith came here from the Finger Lakes area of New York in 1865.  He had previously moved to southern Michigan in 1837 but went back to New York for a few years.  He returned to Michigan in 1865 and bought land in the Cedar Springs area.  We think he came here because of the timber industry because he’d had a sawmill in New York and had another sawmill plus a shingle-making operation after he moved here.  The land was very heavily covered in timber at the time and farming would have required clearing the land first, so making a living off timber was the first order of business.  (That was Israel Chapin’s profession anyway.)  White pine was the timber of choice because it was tall and straight and made excellent shingles.  Like in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota, there were so many trees people thought the timber industry would go on forever.  After all the timber was cut here there was great land for farming so the later generations of the Smith extended family became farmers.

We had dinner with Tim and Bonnie again on Friday night plus spent all day today with them at their lovely lakefront cabin about 10 miles north of Cedar Springs.  We had a wonderful time with them and are hoping they will make the 700 mile trip to Asheville to see us.  They’ve been to the Smokies before so I’m pretty sure the distance won’t deter them.  It will just be a matter of Tim getting the time off from the post office to do it.  It’s uncommon to meet people you hit it off with so well that you can talk non-stop for so much time and still have more to cover.

Our campground here has been an experience.  It is 90% occupied by seasonal/permanent campers.   There are two rows for short-timers or transients like us.  When we arrived there were very few people in the two rows.  By Friday evening every space was filled.  The rules, like most campgrounds, are that there’s only one camper or tent allowed per space.  Check this out:

This was taken through the window next to our couch. The space behind us had 3 tents, 1 screen-room tent and 2 canopies.  They were with the people on the left with a camper and another tent and the people on the right with another camper and tent.  The yellow tent was so close to the back of our RV we could hardly walk around it.  Jim asked one of the campground’s workers how many units were allowed on a space…..we didn’t complain, but when we got back later the yellow and blue tents had been moved to the other side of the canopies.  Still just as many tents on the space but at least they weren’t in our space.  Incredibly poor camping etiquette plus the campground isn’t enforcing its own rules.  We were very lucky that the people weren’t very noisy, but the highway is so loud maybe we just couldn’t hear them over the traffic.  Unfortunately this area has only two campgrounds and the other one was jam-packed, too, and is very tight with a lot of huge trees.   If we come back here to visit Tim and Bonnie we’ll have a hard decision to make on which one to choose. 

Tomorrow is the first day of our two day drive to Niagara Falls.  We’ll be staying one night in Geneva, Ohio, then on to Niagara the next day.  We have to get around Toledo and Cleveland plus drive 385 miles which 85 miles farther than our preferred maximum.  There was nowhere to stay closer than Geneva.  This will be one of the two toughest days of the trip, the other being Boston to Philadelphia on our way home.  Fingers crossed for reasonable traffic and no road construction.