How Cassopolis got its name

Cassopolis, Mich. Ask how Cassopolis got its name and the answer comes quickly: it is the city of Cass, named for Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan Territory, with the Greek word for a city on the end. That much is true. But the county seat was first at another village, the man who won it for Stone Lake is said to have walked through a night of cold rain to do it, and for nearly forty years the post office spelled the name with an A.

We went back to the county’s three histories, of 1875, 1882 and 1906, to Michigan’s first gazetteer of 1838, and to the hand-coloured county map of 1860, to see what the record shows and what is only a good story.

The case in brief

Story or record? Play along

Here are eight things people say about the name. For each, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the paper shows.

The county named Cass

DocumentedCass County was set off by an act of the Legislative Council of Michigan Territory approved on 29 October 1829. The act draws the county’s lines and ends that the land “be, and the same is hereby set off into a separate county and the name thereof shall be Cass.”

ReadingThe act names no one. That the county honours Lewis Cass, governor of the territory from 1813 to 1831, is the reading everyone has always given, and it is surely right; but it is understood, not written. Henry Gannett’s federal Origin of Certain Place Names (1905) lists the county and the village among the names given “for Gen. Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan in 1820.”

The county seat that came first

DocumentedCassopolis was not the first county seat. Howard S. Rogers, in the county’s first history (1875), writes that “sometime in 1830 the County seat of Cass County was located at Geneva, on the bank of Diamond Lake,” by commissioners appointed by the governor. Geneva had been named, Rogers says, after the village of that name in New York.

DocumentedRogers also passes on a story about how Geneva lost: “it is said that some of the Commissioners ... withheld information of their decision one day, and in the mean-time sent an agent to the Land Office.”

Reading“It is said” is Rogers’s own warning. The story may be true, but it is a rumour he heard, not a record he read.

DocumentedOn 4 March 1831, Rogers reports, the Legislative Council passed an act for a new commission to relocate the seats of justice of Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties. The commissioners for Cass, Glover’s history of 1906 says, were Thomas Rowland, Henry Disbrow and George A. O’Keefe, and they were to meet in the county “on the third Monday in May, 1831.”

A race through the rain

DocumentedRogers tells how the new site was won. E. B. Sherman, one of the men who would own it, learned of other men’s plans for the land on Stone Lake, “kept his own counsel,” took his leave, and “started on foot for Edwardsburg”; and on he went, “through the cold rain and dismal darkness in this race for a County seat,” to enter the land first.

ReadingIt is a fine story, and it may be true in its outline: whoever owned the land the commissioners chose stood to gain a town. But Rogers wrote it down forty-four years later, from what old settlers told him, and we have found no record of 1831 that tells it.

A village to be called Cassapolis

DocumentedRogers again: the proprietors “prepared a plat of a village to be called Cassapolis, containing one hundred and sixty acres of land, and each of the four proprietors signed an agreement to donate to the County one-half of his portion of the same, providing the County seat should be located thereon.” Glover, in 1906, counts not four but five proprietors whose names are signed to the plat: E. B. Sherman, A. H. Redfield, Abram Tietsort, Oliver Johnson and Ephraim McCleary.

DocumentedThe commissioners chose the site, and Acting Governor Stevens T. Mason’s proclamation fixing the seat of justice there was, the 1882 history says, “issued December 19, 1831.”

DocumentedThe proprietors had made sure of the commissioners’ goodwill. Glover writes that they “announced with effective ostentation the naming of three principal streets after the commissioners,” and he lists Disbrow, Rowland and O’Keefe streets on the plat. Copies of the original plat, he adds, “are still extant.”

ReadingCass for the governor and the county; polis, Greek for a city, for the town. It was a fashionable ending in the 1820s and 1830s; Indianapolis had been named in 1821. Nobody recorded who chose it.

The A and the O

DocumentedThe first post office, the 1882 history says, had Alexander H. Redfield, one of the proprietors, as its postmaster. Postal-history listings give the office as “Cassapolis” from 1832 to 1870 and “Cassopolis” from 1870.

DocumentedThe O was in print long before the post office took it. John T. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan (1838) has “Cassopolis, village, post office, and seat of justice” for Cass County.

New findingEarlier still: the Episcopal Recorder of Philadelphia, on 23 February 1833, reprinted from the St. Joseph’s Beacon the appointments of Bishop Philander Chase on his winter journey through south-west Michigan: “On January 27th at White Pigeon, on the 29th at Edwardsburgh, on the 30th at Niles, at Edwardsburgh again on the 1st of February, and at Cassopolis on the 2nd and 3rd.” That is the earliest printing of the O spelling we have found, five years before Blois, and in the same year that the federal Official Register still listed the post office, with Alexander H. Redfield as postmaster, as “Cassapolis.” The village was spelled both ways from almost its first year.

DocumentedEven the town’s own historian used both. Rogers’s book of 1875 was printed at “Cassopolis, Mich.,” as its title page says, but his chapter on the village calls it “Cassapolis” throughout.

DocumentedGlover, in 1906, gives the only explanation we have: “the change from a to o, which was clearly dictated by euphony, took place gradually in custom and was finally affirmed by the postoffice department.”

Reading“Euphony” is Glover’s guess. An O also matches the other -opolis towns, from Annapolis to Indianapolis, and that may have pulled the spelling as much as the sound did.

Stone Lake

DocumentedThe village grew on the east shore of Stone Lake. The 1882 history says the lake was “so named from the fact that its shores were originally very thickly strewn with stone.” A settler named Abram Tietsort Jr. had built a log cabin on the east bank in 1829 or 1830; the histories disagree by a year. The Pioneer Log Cabin of 1923 stands on the same east shore today; its story is told in The cabin a county built.

OpenWho named the lake, and when, we have not found.

The name on paper

Play the spellings in order, from the county of 1829 to the town today.

• 1829 Cass (the county, by act of 29 October)
• 1831 Cassapolis (the plat)
• 1832 Cassapolis (the post office)
• 1833 Cassopolis (Bishop Chase’s appointments, in print)
• 1838 Cassopolis (Blois’s gazetteer)
• 22 years later
• 1860 Cassapolis (the county map)
• 1870 Cassopolis (the post office)
• 1875 Cassopolis (Rogers’s title page, with Cassapolis inside)

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “How Cassopolis got its name,” Project Scroll, projectscroll.com/news/how-cassopolis-got-its-name/, first published 22 October 2026. Corrections are welcome, and any we make are noted on this page.