Why the cabin should be kept

Cassopolis, Mich. Documented In the spring of 1923 the people of Cass County raised a two-story log cabin on the shore of Stone Lake out of their own woods, 144 numbered logs, each listed with its giver’s name. Since June 1924 it has held the county’s pioneer museum. The village owns the ground, the county leases it, and volunteers open the door. The story of its building is told in The cabin a county built; this short piece sets out why the cabin is worth keeping, and why it belongs on the historic registers.

Why it should be kept

Reading Start with what the county did. In a few months of 1923 a county of farms and small towns raised a two-story log cabin almost entirely out of its own woods. Some eighty farmers hauled logs into town on one day; fifty-two volunteers did the first morning’s work on the walls; families gave a mantel, a porch bench, the casings of a window; Charles O. Harmon, the county lawyer who led the building, asked his subscribers for dimes for the back-porch steps. The logs, most of the fittings and the work were given, and Harmon set out to pay off the last of the debt a dollar at a time. Nobody had to remember the pioneers that way. It seems they did it because they thought the past belonged to everyone, and that a child ought to be able to walk into it.

Documented The cabin is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places or on the Michigan State Register of Historic Sites, as far as the public listings we checked show. Reading Its protection comes from people: the village that owns the ground, the county that leases it, and the volunteers who open the door. Documented Upkeep costs real money. In August 2012, as the cabin neared its ninetieth anniversary, the local paper reported that it needed a new roof that would cost $12,000. That summer a Cassopolis man and his two grandsons from Mishawaka patched it “to get it through the winter,” and in March 2013 the paper still reported that “the roof needs to be replaced.” That month the Cassopolis–Vandalia Chamber of Commerce gave $3,000 toward the roof and the display cases.

Reading What threatens a log building is slow, not dramatic. The National Park Service’s guide to historic log buildings (Preservation Brief 26) warns above all about water, calls chinking “the least durable part of a log building,” and advises that repairing a log only partly decayed “is always preferable to replacing it.” Those are general principles, not a report on this cabin. But a building of hand-hewn logs on a lakeshore, more than a century old, will always need a sound roof, dry sills, sound chinking and someone watching.

“The silent voice of the days gone by of which it and its contents speak in an influence to the younger people, instilling in them a reverence for labor, loyalty, self denial, and patriotism.”

Reading The cabin is a document you can walk into. A newspaper tells you that 3,000 people came; the cabin shows you what they made. The donor list tells you a family gave a cherry log from Vandalia; the wall holds the cherry log. If the building is lost, the list becomes a list of things that no longer exist. A hundred years on, the cabin needs what it needed in 1923: a county that shows up.

The case for the registers

Reading The cabin belongs on the National Register of Historic Places and on the Michigan State Register of Historic Sites. It is more than a century old, it stands where it was built, and its whole making is written down.

Documented The National Register of Historic Places admits buildings tied to events that shaped a community’s history, buildings that show a way of building, and, when time has given them a significance of their own, buildings put up to honor the past (36 CFR 60.4). Pioneer cabins built to keep settlers’ memory are already on it. The Old Settlers’ Association of Johnson County, Iowa, built two log cabins in 1889 and 1913 “to commemorate the community’s common pioneer heritage”; they were listed in 2013. A pioneer log cabin in City Park at Manhattan, Kansas, was listed in 2020, and the Lincoln Pioneer Village at Rockport, Indiana, a set of log buildings of 1934–35, in 1998. Reading Among Michigan’s log buildings, none we know of was built, as this one was, from logs given by families across a whole county as a pioneer society’s memorial and museum. Cassopolis has something rare.

Reading The cabin meets each of those tests. It is the work of a county-wide commemoration and has housed what is probably the county’s oldest museum collection since 1924. It is a full-size two-story log building raised in a single season by volunteers, with 144 numbered logs, nearly all from the county’s own woods. And after a century it has a history of its own, from the souvenir lots to the 1972 lease.

Documented A listing is a mark of recognition. In the words of the state’s preservation office, it “brings honor and recognition to a property and community,” and “can also facilitate investment through rehabilitation projects and tourism and support some grant funding.” Reading A nomination would go best with the support of the Village of Cassopolis, which owns the ground, and of Cass County, which leases it. Reading What it needs first is what the cabin needed in 1923: people in the county who say they want it done. If you would like to see the cabin on the registers, tell the village council, the museum’s board, or us.

The series: Part 1: A museum before there was a museum · Part 2: The cabin a county built · Part 3: Keepers of the county