Case 1
Who told Shepard?
The only account of the 1846 lodge was written by a man who was a small child when it happened. Somebody told him. Who?
Project Scroll · · 1 min read
Cassopolis, Mich. Everything we know about the lodge of 1846 comes from one account, written by James M. Shepard and printed in Rogers’s History of Cass County in 1875.
Shepard did not see the lodge. He was a small child in 1846 and came to Cassopolis only in September 1868, as the village dentist. When he wrote, about 1875, three of the four charter men could still be found in or near the county: Dr. Evan J. Bonine at Niles, Jordan P. Osborn at Cassopolis, and Dr. Leander Osborn at Vandalia.
And he was not sure of everything he had been told. In the 1875 text the founders are “the charter (?) members,” with his own question mark. Mathews, reprinting the passage in 1882, dropped it.
So Case 1 asks: who told him? A founder, a member, a guest at the ball, the hotel’s keeper? The answer, if it survives, is in the record: in the books, the papers of the 1870s, or the lives of the men themselves.
Case 1 was first opened on 15 October with a different question, whether the lodge ever had a real charter. That question answered itself in Shepard’s own question mark, so the case now asks the one beneath it.
Open Case 1 The whole case board
Corrections: none
First published 22 October 2026. Like all our pages, it is expanded from time to time with new records, pictures and features. No factual corrections have been needed so far.
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