41 High Street
One house in Logan stands at the center of this book: 41 High Street, the home of Lawrence and Malissa Carey. Their sons grew up in it, Lawrence died in it, and Malissa held it for almost forty-three years after he was gone. This page is the house's own record: first the chain that stands, then — plainly marked — the one paper still out.
The chain that stands
- 1925
The Logan telephone directory lists the household in print: “Cary, Mrs. Lawrence, Willie, Frank, James, Carl, Emmit, Willis, High St.” — the family on High Street, under Malissa's name, six sons at home, two years before Lawrence's death.
- May 28, 1927
Lawrence came home from the courthouse at the noon recess of his own trial — escorted, as the wire reports carried it — and died in the house that noon. The number the family knows the house by, 41, is on the paper from 1930 forward; the directory gives the street, and the street gives the house.
- 1930
The census finds Malissa at 41 High Street, head of the household, the house hers, valued at $3,000 — three years a widow, the boys still at home around her.
- 1940
The census finds her there still: the same house, the same name on it, a decade into a widowhood that would run more than forty years.
- May 1, 1970
Malissa died at 41 High Street. She had kept the house from the year of the directory through the Depression, the war, and the whole second half of the family's Logan story.
- 1971
The family settled her affairs among the children, and the house passed out of the family's hands — closing the family's forty-six years, at least, on High Street.
The one paper still out
What the chain does not yet show is the acquisition deed: the paper that says when the Careys bought the house, who sold it to them, and in whose name the purchase was made. The county's grantee index offers a candidate — a deed of 1924, J. A. Washington and others to Lawrence Cary, Deed Book 69, page 216, the only deed into Lawrence's own name the index shows for his years in town — and no deed from Lawrence to Malissa appears at all, which is itself part of the house's story: her name stood on the house in his lifetime by some arrangement other than a transfer deed between them. But a candidate is not a proof. The deed's full text, Malissa's estate papers, and the deed that carried the house out of the family have been ordered from the Logan County Clerk, and this page will say no more than the paper supports until they are in hand.
What this page becomes
When the clerk's copies arrive, this page stops being a chain and becomes the house's paper room: the deed itself, word for word; the household as each census found it, decade by decade; the house's footprint as the fire-insurance maps drew it; and any photograph of it the family can put in our hands. The house earned its tab the way everything on this site earns its place — it is where the story happened.
The directory listing is quoted as printed, spellings included. Research by Larry Lorimer and Omni, his AI research assistant.