Mt. Pleasant Beautiful

With the cooperation of the Southeast Iowa Union/Mt. Pleasant News, The Mt. Pleasant Historic Preservation Commission will be publishing, every week or two peeks at some of the featured homes in the 1909 book, Mt. Pleasant Beautiful.

In the series, the 1909 picture will be contrasted with one of recent vintage. The Commission has been collecting information for the eventual issuance of a new book updating the information on the still standing homes from the 1909 publication.

You can test your knowledge of historic Mt. Pleasant with this column. The identity of the featured home will be published with the next featured home. The last featured home was the Hutton House, 901 West Clay.

Today’s featured home is somewhat different than all our previously featured homes in that it did not appear in the 1909 Mount Pleasant Beautiful book as someone’s residence. It was one of 15 Mt. Pleasant churches highlighted in the book and having been constructed just two years earlier, the newest.

The history of Seventh-day Adventists in Mt. Pleasant goes back to 1860 with the arrival of the first Adventist preacher according to the 1879 History of Henry County. A notice in the August 8, 1863 Home Journal states that “A meeting of the Seventh-day Adventists will be held at or near Liberty School House, southeast of Mt. Pleasant” starting on August 14th and lasting for several days. What is known is that Elder B. F. Shook organized the church with 16 members at Liberty School at about that time.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church denomination had been aborning for about 20 years at that time, an outgrowth of the Millerite movement in upstate New York according to Wikipedia. It was formerly established at Battle Creek, Michigan in May of 1863.

Wholeness and health have always been mainstay of the church’s outlook. In case you remember Battle Creek as the home of Kellogs, the cereal maker, you might be interested to know that corn flakes were invented by the Kellog brothers at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, an institution started and run by the Seventy-day Adventists.

But we digress. The Mt. Pleasant Adventist group grew and eventually became property owners in the 300 block of South Main, as we highlighted in our discussion of the home at 305 South Main a few months ago. In 1907 the hard-working group erected their new home as pictured in the 1909 book.

Although the world-wide Seventh-day Adventist church continues to be a viable denomination, activity petered out in Mt. Pleasant during the first half of the 20th Century. The Mt. Pleasant News in 1948 reported that “regular services are no longer being held”. A Google search turns up 50 churches in Iowa, with a wide range of membership numbers, although many show less than fifty members.

Property records show that the building was sold into private ownership in 1950.

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