Balloons over the pioneer picnic

Cassopolis, Mich. On Wednesday, 18 June 1890, the Cass County Pioneer Society held its seventeenth annual picnic. “The day was fair and the crowd estimated over 10,000,” a Cassopolis correspondent signing himself “W. B.” wrote to the Plaindealer of Detroit. New finding Twice that day a balloon went up over the grounds, and someone came down from it under a parachute: “Two successful balloon ascensions and parachute leaps at 10 o’clock in the morning and 4:30 o’clock in the afternoon satisfied the curiosity of the spectators.”

Documented The rest of the day was the familiar pioneer program. The Paw Paw True Northerner had announced that the picnic would be on the fair grounds at Cassopolis, with Gen. A. T. McReynolds of Grand Rapids and Judge Thomas R. Sherwood of Kalamazoo to speak. The Weekly Expositor of Brockway Centre reported that Sherwood, a former justice of the state supreme court, gave the principal address, and that “short speeches, racy with anecdote and incident, were made by a number of pioneers.” The president, E. S. Smith, “has lived in the county since its first settlement, and his wife, who is still hale and hearty, was on the grounds with him.”

Reading E. S. Smith is the Ezekiel Smith of Glover’s list of presidents, which gives him for 1889 and George T. Shaffer for 1890: a president elected at one June picnic presided at the next.

Documented There was a prize, too. S. B. Turner offered an eight-day clock to the mother with the most living children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Seven women entered. Mrs. Anna East of Vandalia won it with seven children, twenty-four grandchildren and thirty great-grandchildren: sixty-one in all.

Reading She was very probably the Anna East whom Mathews’s county history of 1882 names, with her husband James, as “an old family of the county,” whose daughter Martha married the county surveyor and former legislator Amos Smith in 1855. The papers of 1890 give no first name for her husband, so this is our reading.

Open Who went up in the balloon? Neither report names the aeronaut, and we have not found a name in any other paper of that summer. Parachute leaps were a travelling act in 1890. An Indianapolis paper of 11 June reported “the balloon ascension and parachute leap by Professor Jenkins” at a race meeting at Cambridge City, Indiana; the True Northerner listed “a balloon ascension and parachute drop” among the Fourth of July attractions at Lake Park; and a show at Alpena advertised “balloon races and parachute leaps, free to everybody.” Whether one of these performers came to Cassopolis we cannot say. The county’s own weeklies of 1890 are not yet online, and they are the likeliest place to find him, and to learn whether the Society paid for the show or someone else did.

Documented Thirty-four years later, the program for the picnic that opened the Pioneer Log Cabin as a museum, on 18 June 1924, promised flying again: “the Burns Flyers with air-ships will arrive the evening before and be at the service all day of those wishing to take flying trips.”