The builder of this home lived in many different MP homes

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 Jones House at 307 South Main Street.

The builders of this week’s home could well hold the record for the number of houses they occupied in Mt. Pleasant.

Lew (given name John Louis) and Anna Whitney were married in 1891. Lew Whitney had learned the carpentry trade from his father, a Mt. Pleasant builder.

In 1900, he joined with Karl Bergdahl to form the construction company of Whitney and Bergdahl, which constructed many dwellings that have been featured in this series as well as significant public buildings including, among others, the Saunders School, the school on Adams just south of the railroad tracks, the former City Hall on Monroe, and the 1912 Burlington depot.

The featured house was built in 1904 to which they moved from the home they had built on South White in 1901.

In 1907, they moved to their third house, also on South White almost across the street from the 1904 home. They briefly moved to East Henry in a home swap involving the South White property (which by the way was torn down for the hospital parking lot).

For the 1909 Mt. Pleasant Beautiful publication, the East Henry home was listed as theirs.

Next came a new home on South Jefferson where they stayed until a 1921 purchase on North Main, not a new home but one that had been built by Whitney and Bergdahl in 1906.

The Whitneys stayed in that house until the 1940s, when they moved to Alabama to live with one of their sons. Lew Whitney died there in 1946 at the age of 76. His wife then moved to another son in Maryland, where she lived to the age of 90, passing in 1962

Owners of our featured home in 1909 were Wade and Emma Gillis. Wade Gillis was born in Mt. Pleasant in 1852 but had practiced law for many years in Nebraska.

After the death of his first wife in 1904, he remarried and returned home to Mt. Pleasant, purchasing the Whiney house, and remaining there several years before moving to North Jefferson. He died in 1926 in Evanston, Illinois.