Hunting for Letters in Delaware County, Part 3

As I mentioned last week, Tom and I have been hunting for letters as part of the Delaware County Scavenger Hunt. I don’t know who is in charge of public relations for the Preservation Parks of Delaware County, but they are doing a great job with their special programs.

We continued hunting for letters in the various townships around Delaware County. We followed the clues included in the program and didn’t have too much trouble finding the letters we needed. Several of the townships sent us to places we have already been.

Berkshire Township gave us this clue: “A general who sits atop his mighty steed in the town square.” We needed to find the town square, the statue, and then the nickname of the general. We have been by this statue so often it was easy to figure out. The town is Sunbury, the statue is General William Rosecrans, and his nickname was “Old Rosie.” We put the O in the 14th spot of the secret phrase and continued on.

In Berlin Township we had to go to the Army Corps of Engineers Visitors Center at Alum Creek State Park. Again, we have been there many times, so we knew exactly where it was. We had to find the “White Tail Run” trail and look for a sign next to a large gray boulder. The snow was covering the boulder but we could read the sign and found the name of the rock, “gneiss.” We put the G in the last spot of the secret phrase and continued hunting.

Porter Township has the last covered bridge remaining in Delaware County. Before 1900 there were 64 covered bridges but the Great Flood of 1913 destroyed most of them. Tom and I had already visited this covered bridge but the clue wanted us to to find the first number on the yellow sign by the bridge. Turns out there were multiple yellow signs but they all had the same first number: 8. The clearance height for the bridge is 8 feet, 10 inches. We counted the eighth letter of the alphabet from the end and put the S in the 6th spot in the secret phrase.

Our final previously visited spot was a park named for the spine of a swine in Brown Township. We went hiking at Hogback Ridge Park back in December. This turned out to be one of the hardest clues to find. because it was so vague. The clue told us to find a sign on the north side of the parking lot. There were several signs on the north side of the parking lot, but we knew the letter we were hunting was T. So we had to search until we found a sign where the first letter of the sign was T. The only sign we could find that fit the criteria was the “Tick Alert” sign. The T went in the seventh spot of the secret phrase.