One hundred years ago, The Brownstown Banner carried a story about Harry Ranken and Lou Allen Brodhecker — both who would have been about 16 years old at that time — riding their bikes from Brownstown to Hanover to visit Harry’s brother, Fred, who was attending college.

Three days later in May 1921, the boys rode to Madison to visit Lou Allen’s family. By the time they returned to Brownstown the following day, they had covered about 100 miles.

In July of that year, the Miller’s Corner columnist of the Seymour Daily Tribune wrote that “Townsend Bogie of Paris Crossing left for Iowa” on a bicycle, a trip of “700 miles in eight and one-half days.”

That same month, the Banner reported that Herbert Graham and LE Wildman of Springfield, Ohio stopped in Seymour to buy supplies on their 900-mile cross country bikepacking journey, from their home to Nashville, Tennessee, and back again. Taking a different return route to see new sights, such as Mammoth Cave, the young men carried 75-pounds of luggage, including camping equipment.

In the 1970s, I delivered the Indianapolis News and Star on my bicycle in Brownstown. In 1974, just before the Brownstown Central Middle School 8th grade dance, a friend and I rode our bikes 11 miles from Brownstown to Freetown to visit a female classmate.

I would not ride a bike again for any meaningful distance until 2000, when I was studying at the Berkley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan. I often rode around the city of Lahore to class, shopping, and libraries, where I conducted research, and around campus at the University of Peshawar, where I studied Pashtu, the official language of Afghanistan. A few years later, I would ride 10 or 12 miles through the countryside in rural Maryland for exercise on weekends.

That was the extent of my biking experience, until last January, when at the age of 60, I undertook my first cross-country backpacking journey. I made the 650-mile journey east from Panama City Beach, Florida, to visit my aunt Regina in Fruitland Park, near Orlando, and back again. During the trip, I wrote a blog to chronicle the 17-day trip and share the stories and photographs of the people I met.

This January, a century after Graham and Wildman stopped off in Seymour for supplies on their 900-mile interstate journey, I will ride west from Panama City, Florida, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and back again. Because I am currently researching the Roaring 20s in Jackson County, at the age of 61, I plan to write a daily blog that highlights historical events of that decade, while covering the places and people I meet on the 700-mile cross-country bike trip on the MarvinGray.org website.

Craig Davis, who was born in Seymour and graduated from Brownstown Central High School, currently lives in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and works for a U.S. government contractor on school-based violence prevention. He is the author of “The Middle East for Dummies” and is conducting research for a genealogy and social history book in Kurtz and Freetown. Send comments to [email protected].