05/28/2026
Many of you guessed yesterday’s WHERE is it Wednesday, it was the Centennial Log Cabin, reportedly a replica of the cabin once belonging to James Demint, the founder of Springfield! The full story of the cabin and the man connected with it is a bit complicated, so bear with us.
In the late 1700s (most accounts say 1799, some say 1797), James Demint, who worked both as a teamster hauling freight and a surveyor, left Kentucky with his family and made his way into Ohio. Some reports say he came with Simon Kenton and other early settlers, originally settling west of what would become Springfield on the Mad River. In 1799, Demint built a log cabin on the north bank of Lagonda (today Buck Creek), near a large spring on what is now College Avenue. He also built a grist mill harnessing Mill Run, and even ran a small still near the spring, supplying "fire water" to settlers and Native Americans, possibly Springfield's first business enterprise.
In the spring of 1801, Griffith Foos and his party arrived from Kentucky prospecting the Mad River Valley. They came across Demint's cabin, and Demint was eager to have them stay. It was soon decided to lay out a town. The first survey was made on March 17, 1801, and from those first 96 lots, bounded by Buck Creek and what is now High Street, grew the city of Springfield. The original plat is dated September 5, 1803 and was recorded in Greene County.
Demint died in the summer of 1817 in Urbana. He had 10 children, most of whom pushed on farther west, many settling in Iowa. He is buried at the Springfield Burying Ground (also known as the Columbia Street or Demint Cemetery) on W. Columbia Street. He included the cemetery in his original plat of the town. When he laid out Springfield, he set aside three plots on Columbia Street for a burying ground, which was badly needed at the time. His wife had died in 1803 and is believed to be among the earliest burials there and he was later buried there as well. The cemetery fell into neglect over the decades, but after years of dedicated community effort, it was fully restored and rededicated in May 2023, complete with a statue of Demint himself.
If you've ever been along the south side of College Avenue between Limestone and Fountain, you've passed a boulder with a bronze plaque that reads: "One hundred feet south of this spot, James Demint, the founder of Springfield, built the first cabin in the city." That plaque was placed by the Lagonda Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
No one alive in the early 20th century had seen the original cabin themselves, but in 1913, John W. Parsons, reported to be the second-oldest native of Springfield, described it as actually two log cabins connected by a shared roof. A hand-drawn sketch was donated to the Clark County Historical Society in 1927 by 80-year-old George Netts, who was said to lived in the cabin as a boy. He described it as two stories tall, built of round logs, with the second floor used for storing corn and reached by a ladder on the outside wall. It had a stick chimney plastered with mud.
The cabin site on College Avenue had a long life after Demint. By 1854 it was occupied by the Springfield Female Seminary, depicted in the painting in the collage. In 1885, Northern School was built there, which closed in 1965, became the Springfield Board of Education offices, and was torn down in 1979.
In 1901, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Springfield's founding, the city's centennial committee built a replica log cabin, constructed by William Titus of Harmony, Ohio, at a cost of $220.85. The Springfield Daughters of the American Revolution furnished it with items at least 100 years old including a grandfather clock, saddlebags, a tester bed, and a cradle that had once belonged to Ellen Ludlow Bushnell, wife of Governor Asa Bushnell. (Many mothers visiting the cabin put their babies in that cradle just to say their little ones had rocked in the same cradle as a governor's wife!)
The cabin was the centerpiece of Springfield's Centennial Celebration, held August 4–10, 1901, at the old Clark County Fairgrounds on Yellow Springs Street (today Davey Moore Park). After the festivities ended, the cabin was sold for $60 and moved by William Foos to a spot just west of the bridge on the north side of East High Street, roughly across from where LeAnn's Dairy Delight stands today. In the move, the cabin was accidentally set backwards, so it ended up with its back to the street for the rest of its days!
Almost from the start, there were questions about the cabin's authenticity. A 1922 newspaper noted that a woman living there said visitors came with "varying understandings" of the cabin's origins. A handwritten note on a copy of the photo claimed it was a replica of Lincoln's birthplace cabin rather than Demint's. Our own Floyd Barmann of the Clark County Historical Society later confirmed it wasn't historically accurate, noting that it used the wrong type of logs, a different construction style, and was one floor instead of the two that Demint's cabin actually had. But as Barmann put it, "It was important, not for its authenticity, but as a sign of how we celebrated our heritage 100 years ago.” He called it "a cross between a souvenir and an artifact."
The cabin was added to the city's list of landmarks in 1966. By 1990, it was in dilapidated condition, and Northridge fourth graders who toured it were so dismayed they wrote letters urging its restoration. But it was not to be. By September 1991, it had sat vacant for at least four years. In September 1991, nearly 90 years after it was built, the Centennial Log Cabin burned to the ground.
