The day 3,000 people came to watch one log

Cassopolis, Mich. At half past eight on the morning of 23 May 1923, a black walnut log twenty-six feet long was carried to its place by twenty-four men. A band played and the crowd sang. About three thousand people stood and watched, and many had driven fifty miles or so to be there.

It was the first log of the Cass County Pioneer Log Cabin. A note written on the back of one card of the day says fifty-two volunteers did the first morning’s work.

The logs came from families across the county, given from their own land. Each log was numbered, and a list kept the giver’s name and, for most logs, the town and the kind of tree. The card printed for the occasion gives the building days in one line: May 23 to June 20, 1923 (printed “923”). Four weeks, from the first log to Pioneer Day. The cabin’s 2012 booklet counts 146 logs “banked on the ground”; the numbered donor list has 144.

A year later, on 18 June 1924, the finished cabin opened as a museum at the Pioneer Society’s picnic, and the South Bend News-Times counted “more than 5,000 persons.” Another report put the crowd between six and eight thousand: at least twice as many as had come to watch the first log.

The cabin still stands in Cassopolis today, as the Pioneer Log Cabin Museum⁴. The names of the families who gave the logs survive too: the museum’s 1923 donor list, published in the cabin’s 2012 booklet, gives a name for every numbered log. The work was led by Charles Owen Harmon, the Cassopolis lawyer who was secretary of the revived Cass County Pioneer Society. We have read every line against the page images, and you can search the list for your family’s name. The whole story of the cabin is told in The cabin a county built, part of a three-part series on the Cass County Pioneer Society.