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Last Saturday, March 26th, 2005, was turning out to be a rather nice day weather-wise. Because of this, I figured I should get out and about, so I decided to take a walk through the park. Well, as I’m oddly partial to it, I went and visited Holland Ponds park in Shelby Township again. The difference was that this time I walked all the way through it and all along the Clinton River until I reached Yates Cider Mill, and the park which is across Dequinder from there.
During this walk I noticed a few things… First, that the barrels I had found before were actually empty and somewhat crushed (1 · 2). This wasn’t too readily visible before, but now that a lot of the snow has melted and I could get close to them. This is good to know… At least they aren’t directly leaking chemicals into the river.
Second, was that it really isn’t very far from Holland Ponds to Yates. Once you’ve made it to the river, it doesn’t seem like very long at all before you are suddenly seeing the big red barn. It’s also interesting to follow the path of the train tracks where they used to run through G&H Landfill and along the river, eventually crossing it right near Dequinder.
For some reason I’d never bothered to stop and take a look at the dam at Dequinder and Ryan. I managed to get a few pictues of it and the mostly decayed train bridge.
There also seemed to be quite a few people out fishing that day.
On the way back to the car, I noticed an interesting turbine-looking device on Yates property, right near the start of the trail. Printed right on top of it was some information about exactly how old it is… The markings indicate that it is a “Improved New American Turbine” made by “The Dayton Globe Iron Works Co Dayton O USA”. So, it’s likely that it’s back from the days when Ohio was the only state who’s name began with an O. Wow. I’m impressed… I snapped a few more pictures of it, before I noticed that someone had come up and was photographing Yates’ barn with a viewfinder camera. I’m not used to seeing such things so randomly, so I was fairly impressed.
Also, I was able to get a few shots of the mill’s apple loading system which appears to use narrow-gauge rail and gravity to shuttle carts of apples down into the bottom of the mill, right next to where the water is discharged from.
One other interesting thing I noticed was that Yates’ water discharge goes right into what appears to be the remnants of The Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal. At least now I’m sure of it’s final end point. I think…
On the trail back, I managed to find one other thing that impressed me. Laying face down in the path was a piece of iron about the size of a paperback book. When I turned it over, I saw this, markings which read “B.S Co-LAK 169-A-1923”. If I’m not mistaken, this is most likely iron that was part of the old rail line which ran through the area.
All in all, it was a pretty nice day out, and I was glad to be able to get some more pictures of fairly interesting things. Hopefully one of the next places I explore will be the train track / tunnel which runs beneath Shelby Road at 22 Mile. I think it leads into the Visteon plant there, but I want to see for certain.
