The caretaker was Harmon’s uncle

Cassopolis, Mich. In June 1930 George Scheuer, state editor of the South Bend News-Times, came to Cassopolis for a series on the towns of the valley and found an old man at the door of the Pioneer Log Cabin. “Peter Eby was chosen caretaker and although he has passed the four score mark is still on duty to welcome old residents and to explain the exhibits to the present generation.” The headline read “Aged Citizen Tells Visitors Meaning of Relics.” On the same page was a photograph of “the late Charles O. Harmon, founder of the Cass County Pioneer association, standing, and Peter Eby, caretaker of the museum, seated, before the Log cabin.”

Documented Glover’s Peter Eby was Harmon’s family. Lowell Glover’s county history of 1906 lists the children of the Porter Township pioneer Gabriel Eby: first “Catherine, the widow of John B. Harmon and a resident of Cassopolis,” then Peter, the eldest son, and seven more sons. Harmon’s obituary of 1928 names his parents as “John B. and Catherine Eby Harmon.” New finding Peter Eby was the brother of Harmon’s mother.

Reading The caretaker was almost certainly that Peter. In July 1930 the News-Times reported that the oldest of the Eby brothers, “Peter Eby, 82,” was living “with his daughter Mrs. George Wagner at Cassopolis,” and Glover names Peter’s daughter Florence as the wife of George Wagner. An older Peter Eby, Gabriel’s brother, is named in 1926, but no other Peter Eby past eighty turns up in the Cassopolis news of 1930 we have read. (Glover’s birth date would make him 81, not 82, that July.)

Documented He had grown up in a log cabin. Glover says Peter was born in Elkhart County, Indiana, on 9 August 1848, and was about two months old when his parents moved to Porter Township. Their first home was “a little log cabin sixteen by eighteen feet,” where they lived for fifteen years, and “during which period it was roofed three different times.” He went to the district school in the winters. A list printed in 1926 of the surviving pupils of the Chapel Hill School, near Union, taught by the poet Will Carleton in the winter of 1867–68, includes Peter Eby of Cassopolis, along with Eby pupils named Christian, William, Sam, Dan and Gabe, the names of five of his brothers. In 1922 the corresponding secretary of that school’s reunion was his nephew, Charles O. Harmon.

Documented He married Mary J. Carman in 1871 and farmed eighty acres on section 6 of Porter Township. In 1906 Glover wrote that he “has never been away from his present farm for more than four weeks at a time.”

Documented The family met at the cabin, too. In July 1926 the News-Times announced that the Eby family’s twenty-eighth reunion would be held “on the grounds of the log cabin.” At the thirty-second, in 1930, held at Robbins Lake, the paper counted eight brothers whose ages averaged 73, and noted that their one sister, Harmon’s mother, had died three years before at eighty. Four of the Eby “boys” were justices of the peace.

Open When Peter Eby took the job is not recorded. Scheuer’s article is not reliable on dates: it says Harmon bought the ground in 1923 and raised the cabin the following year, but the cabin went up in May and June 1923, and Harmon himself wrote that the village bought the ground. How long Eby kept the door is not known either. Documented He died at Cassopolis in January 1935, aged 86; his death certificate names his parents as Gabriel Eby and Caroline Wagner.