Project Scroll Research Note 2026-02: The Cassopolis lodge of 1846: the earliest lodge of E Clampus Vitus yet found with its members named

In the spring of 1846 four men instituted a lodge of the "Ancient and Honorable Order of the Eclampsus Vitus" at Cassopolis, Michigan: Dr. E. J. Bonine, Laban Harter, J. P. Osborn and Dr. L. Osborn. James M. Shepard set the story down, and the county histories of 1875 and 1882 printed it. It is the earliest lodge of the order yet found with its founders named, and the first known in Michigan. The names lead somewhere. Between 1844 and 1854 three of the four men married sisters of one family from Centreville, Indiana (when the lodge was founded only Bonine had yet married into the family), the town whose own lodge came before the Indiana legislature for a charter that winter; the fourth married a daughter of Eber Root, the innkeeper whose Union Hotel, by our reading, held the lodge's ball. Project Scroll Research Note 2026-02, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-02/.