“Old Log Cabin”: the song we can’t find

Cassopolis, Mich. On the last Sunday afternoon of October 1923, the Pioneer Log Cabin on Stone Lake held “commemoration services.” The South Bend News-Times printed the program on 24 October, from a Cassopolis report dated the day before. “The public is welcome and accommodations have been provided for visitors. The cabin will be open all day.” The Colonial orchestra of Cassopolis played; the audience sang gospel songs; there was a poem to the cabin by Ralph Scoles Thomas, “the Blind Poet,” a violin solo, and an address by a South Bend pastor. New finding In the middle came this line: “Song. ‘Old Log Cabin,’ words by Jay C. Northrup.”

Open That is all we have. The paper did not print the words, and we have not found them in any other paper, in the issues of Michigan History we searched, or in the cabin’s own published papers. Nor does the program name the tune.

Documented The writer is easier to find than the song. Records spell his name both ways, Northrop and Northrup. Glover’s county history of 1906 lists Jay C. Northrop among the Cassopolis high school graduates of 1891. Hog breeders’ herd books of 1914 and 1915 record Duroc-Jerseys “bred by Jay C. Northrop, Cassopolis, Mich.” In 1928 he was one of eleven Cass County delegates to the Republican state convention, and in 1929 a fruit-grafting demonstration was announced for the orchard of a Jay Northrup “north of Brownsville and east of Diamond Lake.” In 1930 a Jay Northrup, very likely the same man, was lecturer of the Union Grange.

Documented He was also a builder of the cabin. On the transcribed donor list, log No. 6 is his: “Jay C. Northrop, Cassopolis,” a walnut twenty-six feet long.

Reading That may be a log with a story. The first log laid on Cabin Building Day, 23 May 1923, was a black walnut, “26 ft” according to a note on a card of the day. On the transcribed list, Northrop’s is the only walnut marked twenty-six feet; two other walnuts have no length given. The list does not say which log went down first, so this is a possibility, not a finding.

Documented Northrop stayed with the county’s history. A national handbook of historical societies published in 1944 lists the “Cass County Historical Society, Cassopolis. Secretary, Jay C. Northrop, Route No. 3, Cassopolis.” By then the listing was out of date: Northrop had died in Calvin Township on 14 April 1942, aged 72.

Open If your family kept a program of the October 1923 services, a souvenir program of the cabin, or a song sheet headed “Old Log Cabin,” it may hold the only surviving copy of the words. The Cass District Library’s Local History Branch in Cassopolis would want to see it, and so would we.