The Newton House, a farmhouse museum near Decatur

Volinia Township, Mich. On the 1860 wall map of Cass, Van Buren and Berrien counties, Volinia is the third township along the top row of Cass County. Directly above it, across the heavy county line, is Decatur Township in Van Buren County, and the plan of Decatur village is one of the small insets on the map’s left side. In Volinia, on the Marcellus Highway, stands the Newton House.

It is a tall white Italianate farmhouse with a glass-sided lookout on its roof, set at the edge of one of the last big stands of old oak and hickory in southern Michigan. One family lived in it for almost ninety years. The father who started it had marched in the War of 1812 and helped write Michigan’s first constitution; the son who finished it taught one of the county’s first schools, counted the people of a whole county for no pay, and went to Lansing as a legislator. After them came a banker who bought the woods and gave them to a university, and then the volunteers who have kept the doors open on summer Sundays for half a century.

We went back to the county histories of 1875 and 1882, the state and national register records, a 1951 obituary, and the newest news from the university’s board of trustees. Here is what the paper says, and where the paper disagrees with itself.

The house

DocumentedBy the Cass County Historical Society’s account, the house was “built by Colonel James Newton in 1844.” In 1868 his son George Newton “commissioned the architect Christian Haefner to design and build an addition,” and the house is “a fine example of nineteenth century Italianate architecture.” The family lived in it until 1930. The state marker on the road, put up in 1977, puts it more briefly: “Designed by Christian Haefner in the 1860s, this house belonged to George Newton, a state legislator.”

DocumentedThe state’s marker record lists what to look for: a cupola, projecting eaves and windows grouped in symmetrical sets. The National Register entry, number 82002830, lists the architect as Christian G. Haefner, the style as Italianate, and the period of significance as 1850 to 1874, with two “significant years,” 1865 and 1868. The house was listed for its architecture and for its association with a person: George Newton. Wikipedia, drawing on the state’s old historic-sites database, describes a two-story house with clapboard siding, a hip roof topped by a belvedere, a front veranda and a hip-roofed ell, and calls it an “unusually well-preserved example of an Italianate country villa.”

DocumentedTwo older witnesses favor the later date. A Kalamazoo Gazette clipping of about 1928 says “the large house now on the farm was built by George Newton in 1870.” And when George’s daughter, Jane Newton Crego, died in the house in December 1930, her obituary said it “was built 60 years ago” and that she “was 18 years old when this house was built”; she had been born in Volinia on 1 January 1853. “An old Beckwith stove, installed in 1870, is still used,” the paper added.

ReadingThe dates do not quite agree, and that is worth knowing before you go. The society dates the house to 1844 and the addition to 1868; the National Register flags both 1865 and 1868; a 2019 newspaper piece says James built the first section “around 1840” and George added the two-story addition and cupola “between 1868 and 1870”; a 2017 piece calls it simply “built in 1870.” The likeliest reading is an older core from the father’s time, and the Italianate front, with its cupola, designed in the mid-1860s and finished about 1870, as the family remembered it. Note one more coincidence of dates: 1844, the year the society gives for the building, is also the year Colonel Newton died.

The colonel

DocumentedRogers’s county history of 1875 has the Newtons’ lives. Colonel James Newton was born in England in 1777, came to America as a boy and moved to Ohio in 1804. George was born in Preble County, Ohio, in 1810 and came to Michigan with his father in 1831. George taught the first school in the Higgins schoolhouse, the winter after it was built in 1836, and in 1858 he was elected to the state legislature.

DocumentedAlfred Mathews’s larger History of Cass County of 1882 fills in the father. He lived in turn in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and in Ohio settled on Seven Mile Creek, about forty miles north of Cincinnati. (Mathews puts the move to Ohio in 1801; Rogers says 1804.) He won his title as colonel of an Ohio militia regiment. In the War of 1812, Mathews writes, he served under General William Henry Harrison, commanded at Fort Black and later at Fort Meigs, and his service ended a few days before the battle at Mackinac.

DocumentedIn Michigan he went straight into public life. Mathews lists him among Cass County’s delegates to the convention that met at Detroit on 11 May 1835 to frame the first state constitution, and again among the delegates to the convention at Ann Arbor on 26 September 1836. He sat in the state House for Cass and Van Buren counties in the late 1830s, and Governor Stevens T. Mason commissioned him a judge, a commission he never took up. Mathews’s list of Volinia’s township officers names him for 1833–36. He died in Volinia on 20 September 1844.

ReadingThe Ann Arbor convention of September 1836 was the first “convention of assent,” called to accept or refuse the bargain Congress offered Michigan for statehood: give up the Toledo strip, take the western Upper Peninsula. That first convention refused; a second convention, the “Frostbitten Convention” of 14 December 1836, accepted, and Michigan entered the Union on 26 January 1837. If Mathews’s list is right, a Volinia farmer was in the room for one of the tensest votes in the state’s early history.

DocumentedHe was a showman, too. In its chapter on the Harrison campaign of 1840, the log-cabin-and-hard-cider election that sent his old general to the White House, Mathews describes a great Whig rally in Cass County on 6 July, held on a wet morning before a crowd of about 5,000. A big log cabin came in drawn by five horses, with Jonathan Gard riding the near wheel horse, and on top of it rode “Col. James Newton, of Volinia,” astride the ridge-pole, holding a fat raccoon. Another delegation brought a wagon drawn by twenty-six yoke of oxen, one pair for each state then in the Union.

A wilderness, and wolves

DocumentedMathews tells how the family came. In September 1830 Colonel Newton rode up from Preble County with his son-in-law, Jacob H. Zimmerman, to look over the country. On 6 April 1831 George, his sister Ann and Zimmerman set out with a wagon. They crossed the flooded Stillwater River, camped on the battlefield at Fort Recovery, ferried the wagon over the Wabash in a pirogue, and passed Elkhart, Indiana, which, Mathews says, was then a single log cabin.

DocumentedThat first summer they raised corn and oats near Christiana Creek, on the school section near the later Jamestown, in what became Penn Township. In August the men went back to Ohio and returned with the colonel, his wife and the Zimmerman family. They wintered in Penn, then moved to the land the Newtons would keep, where they put up a three-room log house in the shape of an L. The government land sales that Mathews prints show James Newton buying in Cass County on 23 March 1832 and George on 16 May 1836.

DocumentedIt was on that building site that Mathews places his best story, the “Narrow Escape of Miss Ann Newton from the Wolves.” The men had gone off for boards and left Ann alone at the half-built cabin. A large pack of hungry wolves came out of the woods; she climbed up onto the logs; and the family’s watchdog went for the pack and drove it back into the trees. The dog was badly torn, Mathews says, but was nursed back to health.

ReadingThe story is family tradition written down fifty years later, and we tag it that way. But the setting is real. Mathews’s chapter on pioneer life records that Cass County’s supervisors were paying a bounty on wolf scalps by October 1834, two dollars for a grown wolf, and raised it after that.

George Newton’s Volinia

DocumentedMathews’s biography of “Hon. George Newton” gives his birth date as 10 August 1810, in Preble County. On 14 December 1837 he married Esther Green, a daughter of the pioneer Jesse Green; William Ferrel, Esq., officiated. They had two children, John M. and Mary J. In the 1882 book the couple’s portraits face page 284.

DocumentedThe small things in Mathews are the best. George, he says, used two trees that had grown together as a cheese press, and made his wife’s first clothesline from a long slim pole held up by saplings that had grown twisted together. In 1835 Sheriff Henry H. Fowler appointed him census taker, and his district took in the whole of Van Buren County, then attached to Volinia; he was never paid for the work.

DocumentedHe was the first teacher in the Higgins schoolhouse, the log school in neighboring Wayne Township. Here the two county histories differ by a year: Rogers says the school was built in 1836 and George taught the following winter; Mathews says it was built in the fall of 1835 and George taught there in the winter of 1835–36.

DocumentedThe township’s civic life ran through him. When eleven men organized a society against horse thieves in 1852, George Newton was its secretary and the first to bring his horses in to be recorded. He was a charter member of Volinia Lodge No. 227 of the Masons, chartered on 9 January 1868. A church of the Dunkards stood on ground he lent them free for as long as it was used for worship, and they named it Newton Grove Church. Mathews lists him among the township’s officers for 1851–52 and among Cass County’s state representatives for 1858–60, and when the Cass County Pioneer Society was founded at Cassopolis on 9 October 1873, before about 200 people, “Hon. George Newton, of Volinia, was made temporary Chairman.” He died in 1883.

The architect next door

DocumentedWho was Christian Haefner? The registers give only his name and his middle initial, G. One more line turns up in Mathews: in the lists of Cass County men who served in the Civil War, “Haefner, Christian G., Volinia,” enlisted on 27 February 1864 and was mustered out on 25 July.

ReadingIf that soldier is the architect, and the name, initial and township all match, then the man who designed the Italianate front of the Newton House was a Volinia neighbor who came home from the war in the summer of 1865, the year the state’s historic-sites record, as Wikipedia gives it, assigns to George Newton’s commission (the National Register flags 1865 as a significant year). We have not found any other building credited to him.

Ninety-nine years of woods

DocumentedThe Newtons are remembered as much for the trees they did not cut as for the house they built. A 2019 report in Leader Publications says the family owned and protected the surrounding woods for 99 years, from 1832, and would not allow them to be logged or cleared for farming.

DocumentedThe last of the family was Jane Newton Crego, George’s daughter. She had married Henry Crego in 1898 and outlived him and her brother Milton, and she “passed away at the old homestead” on 10 December 1930; the Rev. Joseph Fox officiated, and she was buried in Crane cemetery. The farm went to nine cousins, among them “the heirs of Mrs. Chris Haefner,” under an administrator, Jesse G. Green of Wayne. People had long had their eye on the trees: Mrs. Crego was said to have “refused $150,000 for the timber during the World War,” and in 1931 former Representative Otis Huff’s bill to have the state buy the property for $60,000 “passed the house with but one dissenting vote and died in the senate committee,” opposed by Volinia people who wanted the land kept on the tax rolls.

ReadingIf the Mrs. Chris Haefner among the heirs was the architect’s wife, Christian G. Haefner had married into the Newtons’ own cousinage, which makes him more of an architect next door than ever.

DocumentedIn 1935 Fred Russ bought the house and the timberland around it, and in 1942 the land went to Michigan State University as a gift. It became the Fred Russ Experimental Forest, 580 acres, and the house was restored by the Cass County Historical Commission. A 40-acre stand of oak and hickory in the forest, named Newton Woods after George Newton, was made a National Natural Landmark in 1976. The house was entered on the state register of historic sites in 1974 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

DocumentedThe sale itself is in the papers. “The deal was consummated Thursday morning, June 6, 1935, when the sale made by Administrator Jesse G. Green of Wayne was confirmed by Probate Judge Fields,” for $40,000; “Mr. Russ gets 580 acres, 400 of which are south of the Dowagiac-Marcellus road.” A South Bend lumber company had already bought 160 acres of timber the winter before. The clipping describes the buyer: Fred Russ “grew up in Berrien County, graduated from the University of Michigan, practiced law in South Bend,” and with his brother Charles “established the Russ Company of South Bend and put upon the market the nationally known Russ Bleaching Blue.” In 1942 the deed “was delivered … to William H. Berkey, chairman of the Michigan State College Board and editor of the Cassopolis Vigilant”; the farm was then worked by Russ and his tenant, Floyd Robinson.

DocumentedRuss’s obituary in the Niles Daily Star of 11 April 1951 tells the rest. He was 81, a banker and philanthropist, born in Berrien County to Hiram E. and Helen Valentine Russ, and a Cassopolis resident for about 35 years. He had been president of the Cass County State Bank. The paper says he bought the tract, then known as “Newton’s Woods,” for $40,000 in 1935, ran it as a tulip-tree nursery, and in 1942 gave the 580 acres, “much of it virgin timber,” to the forestry department of Michigan State College, where students used it as an outdoor laboratory. The college’s own paper, The Record, reported his death that June and said the land was being used for experimental work in forestry.

ReadingThe sale record settles the year Russ bought: 1935, as his obituary says. The 1931 of the Wikipedia articles, which cite a Michigan Academy of Science report of that year, is more likely the year the woods first drew the state’s attention, with Otis Huff’s bill, than the year of a sale. A 2019 newspaper piece says he sold the estate to the university in 1943; the deed was delivered in 1942.

DocumentedToday the woods are the reason many visitors come. Newton Woods lies where the Marcellus Highway crosses Dowagiac Creek, about eight miles east of Dowagiac. The university calls it a “virtually undisturbed, mature oak-hickory forest.” The Old-Growth Forest Network, which lists 80 acres of old growth there, notes that minor thinnings were made in 1941 and 1956. The forest is known for black walnut and tulip trees, and one tulip tree there has been claimed as the largest of its kind in Michigan, at 180 feet. When Michigan Public asked a Michigan State forestry professor, Donald Dickmann, in 2017 where to see old growth in southern Michigan, he pointed to Newton Woods, where you can see “some really big hardwood trees.”

DocumentedJust east of the woods, where the Marcellus Highway meets Gards Prairie Road, stood the hamlet of Volinia, which lasted from 1834 to 1902 and has since vanished.

Keeping the doors open

DocumentedThe house has been open to the public since the 1970s. Leader Publications reported in 2017 that the county’s Historical Commission began leasing it from Michigan State in 1974, after the university had used it to house foresters working at the Russ Forest. “MSU agreed to charge as little as possible for the lease, as long as the commission kept the house open to the public,” Ann Palmer told the paper. Inside are hundreds of objects from the middle 1800s, some original to the house, among them furniture, stoves, tools and clothing, some given and some bought at auction. Volunteer guides take visitors all the way up into the cupola.

DocumentedIn 1967 the old house was still “the area headquarters of the Forestry Department of Michigan State University,” by the Kalamazoo Gazette’s account. By February 1975 the county’s new Historical Commission, created in 1973, was offering Sunday tours from 1 to 4:30 of “the 17-room Italianate home,” “furnished with appropriate period pieces, most of which are donated or loaned by private individuals.” Two years later it was “being restored by the Cass County Historical Commission,” with its summer kitchen, hired man’s quarters and a front parlor with ten-foot doors of walnut and butternut.

DocumentedNew finding The National Register nomination of 1982 settles who held the house: “In August 1974 the university leased the Newton House and its four acre site to the Cass County Historical Commission, which now operates the home as a county museum,” and a letter from the university’s Department of Forestry in the same file says it was then held “under a lease dated January 8, 1980, and expiring June 30, 1984.” Michigan State’s trustees, in their paper of June 2026, date a lease to the Cass County Historical Society from January 1980, at a dollar a year. Reading The lease of January 1980 was the Commission’s, most likely a renewal, and in 1974 the Commission and the Society had the same head, Lee Dodd. Documented In 2017 the society described its work to the state as being “in charge of preserving the Newton House in Cass County.” On 12 June 2026 WVPE reported that Michigan State’s trustees, meeting in Benton Harbor, had agreed to let the university sell the house outright to the Cass County Historical Society. The society’s secretary-treasurer, Melissa Bettinger, said ownership would make grants and gifts easier to win, and put the work needed at more than $200,000, including a new roof, a furnace, windows and exterior paint. Under the trustees’ resolution the university keeps the rest of the Fred Russ forest, and the proceeds go to the forest’s endowment. The county’s historical commission, formed to oversee the property, has asked to move to a supporting role. We have not yet been able to confirm that the sale has closed. The society’s story, and its descent from the Pioneer Society of 1873, is told in Keepers of the county.

A timeline

• 1777 James Newton born in England
• 33 years later
• 1810 George Newton born in Preble County, Ohio, 10 August
• 21 years later
• 1831 George, Ann and Jacob Zimmerman set out for Michigan, 6 April
• 1835 James Newton a delegate to the constitutional convention at Detroit
• 1837 George marries Esther Green, 14 December
• 1840 The colonel rides a log cabin in the Harrison rally, 6 July
• 1844 The house dated by the society; Colonel Newton dies, 20 September
• 1858 George elected to the legislature
• 1865–68 Christian G. Haefner designs the Italianate addition
• c. 1870 The Italianate house finished, by the family’s account
• 60 years later
• 1930 Jane Newton Crego, the last of the family, dies at the house, 10 December
• 1931 A bill to buy the woods for the state passes the House and dies in the Senate
• 1935 Fred Russ buys the house and 580 acres for $40,000, 6 June
• 1942 Russ gives 580 acres to Michigan State
• 32 years later
• 1974 State historic site; Michigan State leases the house to the county’s Historical Commission in August
• 1975 The Historical Commission opens Sunday tours
• 1976 Newton Woods a National Natural Landmark
• 1977 State marker erected
• 1980 A new lease to the Commission, 8 January
• 1982 National Register of Historic Places
• 44 years later
• 2026 Trustees agree to sell the house to the historical society, June

If you go

The Newton House is at 20689 Marcellus Highway, Decatur, and opens its doors on the first Sunday of each month from June to September, 1:00 to 4:30 pm. The 2026 season is over; check the society’s website before you go next summer. Its rooms show daily life across the years the Newtons lived there, and several are set aside for reading and research on the family, the woods around the house and local history. The society holds its Fall Festival at the house each October (on Saturday 10 October in 2026) and opens it for Christmas in early December; both are on our Seasons & festivals page, and the society’s site has the dates. The Fred Russ Forest around the house belongs to Michigan State University; keep to the marked public areas. One more thing to try: open the 1860 map, find Volinia, and see whether the Newton name is on its farms.