This home is linked with an unsolved murder

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 Galer House, 403 East Washington Street.

This week we feature a home built in 1857 by a couple, Henry and Louise McCabe who left the city shortly after building the home. Selling to W. O. and Ann Osgood started a string of four property transfers by 1875, including two at sheriff’s sales. Joseph Cherry bought the house in 1875 for a mere $116.

Cherry sold in 1880 to Edward Howard, whose family became involved in yet another unsolved murder the following year. Howard was from Pennsylvania but at age 10 he came to Mt. Pleasant to be raised by his late father’s sister, Emma Howard Gillis and her husband, Charles Gillis. Young Howard went to work at National State Bank and at the age of 27 he purchased our featured house. At that point his widowed mother in Pennsylvania came to live with him.

Oh yes, we promised a murder: on Feb. 23, 1881, an apparent stranger appeared at the door of the Gillis residence on West Monroe. There Charles and Emma Gillis lived with Gillis’ aged father. After a short discussion when Charles answered the door, a shot rang out and Gillis lay dead on the entry floor. The stranger was unidentified but he made his escape by a bus that ran to the depot and caught the evening train out of town.

A local paper described Gillis thusly: “Mr. Gillis has lived here for sixteen or seventeen years, and has always been regarded by his neighbors as a quiet, peaceable man, with, perhaps, as few enemies as any man in the county. Living a quiet, unostentatious life, he still managed to make himself highly prized by his neighbors for his kindness of heart and rare manly qualities. Thus it happens that those who know him best are most at a loss to account for the motive of the deed.”

No one was ever charged with or identified with the crime. From the viewpoint of a century and a half later, the most plausible idea is one that related the crime to activity by the elder Gillis with Free Masons in upstate New York about 50 years earlier. At this point we will never know.

Back to the basic story: Edward Howard married and moved to the state of Washington, leaving his mother at our featured house where she resided until her death in 1900.

Retired rural farmers Lewis and Florence Speidel purchased the house in 1901. By the time of the Mt. Pleasant Beautiful publication in 1909, Lewis had passed away and Florence occupied the house alone. The Speidels made several changes to the house, adding a porch, bay window and other items.