This is the waterfront near where General Cutcheon and his wife had their cottage, Maplewood, from 1896 to 1908. He once
said that he wanted his town’s future to remain “as evergreen as our forests, and as everlasting as the inland sea.”

The first day of autumn is only a couple of days away. You can feel it in the air. You can hear it in the waves and the wind. In September of 1903, Mrs. Byron Cutcheon wrote to her friend Rebecca Richmond from their cottage on Omena Point. She reported that, “The general is feeling the drafts.”  She added what many of us are feeling about this change in seasons. “We are reluctant to leave Omena. There have been many days of rain, but the sunny ones make us doubly glad by contrast. These Autumn days have a beauty all their own and we rejoice in having seen the succession of the seasons, each with its own peculiar beauty.”  On the coolest days they hovered close to the fire and read aloud to each other, reluctant to give up each other and their retreat from the world.

General Byron Cutcheon in 1902. Retired and enjoyed summer life in Omena. Photo courtesy of Omena Historical Society

General Cutcheon’s Civil War Service

Byron Cutcheon’s service in the Civil War began in 1862. He volunteered for the local regiment and rapidly rose through the ranks of the Union Army. When he resigned from the Army in 1865, he was a Brigadier General and bore two wounds from battles in the Civil War.

Returning from War

He then returned to the University of Michigan and earned a law degree. He moved to Manistee, and joined a law partnership. He formed another partnership with seven other men to improve the flow of the river in 1870. They were charging a toll for logs to pass through it to get to the lumber mills. A fine speaker and writer, in 1882 he was elected to the United States Congress. There he served three successive terms. In 1890 Congressman Cutcheon proposed a bill to make Gettysburg a National Military Park. He wanted it commemorating both the north and the south. The opposition to this bill was fierce, and the controversy may have cost him his Congressional seat in the election of 1890. Eventually his vision prevailed, and Gettysburg became the commemoration of the Civil War it is today. 

Courtesy Omena Historical Society and “Omena, A Place In Time”