As soon as I started looking into the records that Ms. Nicholas dug out for me in the historical society archives, I found a discrepancy about the house’s date. According to a local 1835 map of the area, the house was already standing at that date. Two years wasn’t much of a difference, though, so I wasn’t too concerned. I could just say ~1837 and keep the family story solid.
But then, Ms. Nicholas put me onto a trove of hospital records from Western State. Mary Baldwin College held the collection, and they’d digitized most of it. It was a researcher’s paradise.
Immediately, though, some of the records made me question whether Micah Cavanaugh had ever been in a position to build a house. The medical records I found digitized in a local university’s archives indicated that Micah had been
