Young Bruce Catton, who sat mesmerized by the tales of old Civil War veterans in the small northern Michigan town of Benzonia, Michigan, grew up to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of many popular histories of the War Between the States.
We often visit Benzonia, and once found a particularly tricky geocache in the park where young Bruce played Civil War games with his buddies near the turn of the twentieth century.
I knew about the Benzonia/Catton connection, and with the approach of the Civil War sesquicentennial, I thought it was a good time to share the story.
Congregationalists settle Benzonia, establish school
In 1858, Reverend Charles E. Bailey and four families from a Congregational church in Oberlin, Ohio, arrived in northern Michigan's wilderness to establish a Christian community with a college modeled after Oberlin.
The school began as Grand Traverse College offering classes at someone's home, and later in a two-story frame building in Benzonia.
The school offered college preparatory classes and teacher training, accepting students of both genders and of all races and ethnic origin.
The school started with 13 students in 1860. That number grew to 150 students by 1875, with many graduates becoming teachers in western Michigan's lumbering towns.
In 1891, Grand Traverse College became Benzonia College.
Lumbering declined as the forests disappeared during the late 1800s, farming in the area was generally difficult, and the population declined.
Benzonia College struggled, lacking students or money, and it became a college prep school called Benzonia Academy in 1900.
The Catton family in Benzonia
Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan. His family came to Benzonia when his father taught at the school and, in 1906, became principal of the 40-student academy.
In 1909, Benzonia Academy's main campus building burned down, and school officials replaced it with a wooden-frame and brick-veneer building called Mills Cottage. It became the girls' dormitory, central dining hall, and home to Principal Catton's family.
Young Bruce Catton had fond memories of old men with long grey beards and wearing blue uniforms with brass buttons that took center stage each Decoration Day (aka Memorial Day) during his childhood. Catton loved the stories they spun about their Civil War days, and history became alive for him as he listened to their tales.
Catton graduated from Benzonia Academy and attended Oberlin College in 1916. His father remained principal of the academy until 1917.
Benzonia Academy closed after graduating one last class of 10 students in 1918.
Catton leaves Benzonia, finds his voice
Catton left Oberlin College to join the Navy during World War I. He worked as a newspaper reporter at the Cleveland News, the Boston Herald-American, and The Cleveland Plain Dealer before moving to Washington D.C. in the mid-1920s to work for a news syndication service. He worked for the Federal government through World War II as a director of information.
Catton wrote his first book, The War Lords of Washington, in 1948, leaving his bureaucratic job for his new career as an author.
Catton turned to the subject that sparked his imagination as a young boy, writing Mr. Lincoln's Army in 1951. It was the first of his 13 Civil War books.
Catton's next book, A Stillness at Appomattox, explored the final campaign of the war in Virginia. It was his first real commercial success, earning him the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for history.
His lyrical writing and love for telling stories of the privates, rather than the generals or simply regurgitating dry facts and figures, made Catton's histories popular beyond professional historians and academicians.
The rest of the story
Catton helped establish American Heritage magazine in 1954. He became the magazine's senior editor in 1959, remaining there until his 1978 death at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan. His gravesite is in the Benzonia Township Cemetery.
Catton wrote about his childhood in Benzonia during the 1970s in Waiting for the Morning Train.
Mills Cottage became the Mills Community House and Benzonia Public Library in 1925. It earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
If you're looking for a Wi-Fi connection as you travel in the area, you can sit on the building's spacious front porch and access the library's connection, even when the building isn't open according its website.
For the curious, the geocache we found in the park next to the building where young Bruce played Civil War is no longer there, although it remains one of our more memorable finds. It was a two-stage cache where you solved a math puzzled based on information from an historical marker about the academy. The solution led you to a micro cache hidden on the underside of a piece of tree bark about 3/4 by 1-1/2 inches in size and tacked back on the tree with a small hook.
Looking for other Midwest locations with a Civil War connection? Check out my story, Brake for Civil War history in Indiana, about a marker at the site of a Civil War training camp.
© Dominique King 2011 All rights reserved
