The miniature log cabin of 1878

Cassopolis, Mich. The Cass County Pioneer Society held its picnic on Wednesday, 19 June 1878, and the Cass County Republican of Dowagiac could hardly find the words: “to say that it was a grand success is mild language.” At ten o’clock Secretary Glover called the crowd to order. After a dinner “which did not indicate a famine in Cass county,” S. C. Coffinbury gave the address, though “the crowd was so great that but few comparatively could listen.” The historian, C. W. Clisbee, read the names of about seventy pioneers who had died in the year. The paper also had some fun with “our juvenile band”: its “three young fellows” had “pounded their drums while the old men were talking, but they will know better when they grow older.” The band was Daniel Blish, fifer, with J. G. Defendorf and Charles Brownell on the drums, and Blish was no boy: he was almost certainly the Daniel Blish of Dowagiac who was the Society’s executive committeeman for that town that year.

New finding The report ends with two more sentences: “Forty-one names were added to the list. Henry Michael presented to the society a miniature log cabin all complete, which attracted much attention.” That is all we have found written about it. Documented It was forty-five years before the county raised its full-size Pioneer Log Cabin on Stone Lake.

Documented Henry Michael was a Dowagiac man. A county biography of 1893 says he was born on 5 December 1827 near Xenia, in Greene County, Ohio, and was three when his parents brought him to Michigan in 1830, first to Howard Township in Cass County and then to Berrien County. In 1849 he walked back to Xenia to learn the gunsmith’s trade, and he followed it in Dowagiac. When fire swept the business street on 2 January 1864, his small gun shop was pulled down to keep the flames from spreading. That year he crossed the plains to California with a wagon train, mined and worked as a carpenter, and came home by way of Panama.

Documented He became part of the town’s public business: a conveyancer and real-estate dealer from 1859, a notary from 1860, a justice of the peace from 1868 to 1874 and again from 1883, and for about fourteen years clerk of Silver Creek Township. In 1852, when typhoid fever came to the young village, Alfred Mathews wrote that “of thirteen persons attacked … eleven died,” Henry Michael and a Mrs. Bull “escaping.” By 1893 he was the only pension agent in Cass County and had filed more than three hundred claims.

Documented He served the Pioneer Society as well. He sat on its executive committee for Dowagiac in 1879, 1880 and 1882, and Lowell Glover’s list of the Society’s presidents reads “1896 — Henry Michael.” The county atlas of that year lists him as “Justice of Peace, Notary Public & Conveyancer & Pension Claim Agent, Dowagiac,” in the county since 1830.

Reading The paper does not say that he made the little cabin. A man trained as a gunsmith, who had also worked as a carpenter, certainly had the hands for it, but that is our guess and not the record.

Open What became of it is not known. By 1880 the Society’s museum was kept in I. V. Sherman’s store, and its printed report for that year lists only the gifts of 1879–80; no list from 1878 has been found. The county histories of 1882 and 1906 do not mention the model, and no list has been found of the collection that moved from the Court House lobby into the real cabin in 1923–24. When Henry Michael died has not been found exactly: he was alive in 1896, and a Dowagiac directory of 1899 lists “Michael, Mrs. Harriet E. wid.” at 205 Green Street, with Miss Julia E. Michael, a teacher, at the same address. The 1893 sketch names his wife as Hattie and his daughter Julia E. as a Dowagiac teacher, and his son-in-law G. B. Moore is listed at the same address in 1899. If a small model log cabin has turned up in a Cass County attic or display case, we would like to hear about it.