This home remained in the same family for 54 years

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 McCabe House, 701 East Monroe St.

This week, we feature a home that remained in the same family for 54 years and the owner was a part of one of the longest family owned businesses in Mt. Pleasant when he retired in 1945. John and Lizzie Jericho were married in 1894 and moved into their new house the next year.

John and his father, Gustave, had purchased the pharmacy in the Brazelton Hotel building in 1889. Along with John’s brother, Gustave, the pharmacy continued in the family at least until John’s retirement in the late 1940s. The intersection of Main and Monroe was known as Jericho Corner.

The Jericho family was well known throughout Mt. Pleasant. John was a very active Mason, served on the school board, as county coroner and as secretary of the Rotary Club.

Lizzie Jericho died at age 35 in 1902, and at the time Mt. Pleasant Beautiful was published in 1909, John is shown as sole owner of the house. He remarried in 1921, joining with Maude McDonald. They continued to live in the house, taking pride in their rose garden and in entertaining friends. John died in 1948, and Maude joined him the following year.

The home was then purchased by M. Hall and Mary Weir. Weir was employed in the family lumber business on which we have reported previously. In 1955, he purchased the nearby Cookes-Lunning Funeral Home, changing the name to Cookes-Weir Funeral Home and he and Maude moved to an apartment on the second floor of the business.

The house was sold to William and Florence Hobbie, farmers from north of town. Hobbie became a real estate agent and died in 1967 at age 87. In 1968, the home was sold to another retired farmer, Max Collins who converted it to apartments.

And so we come full circle to yet another murder connected to a Mt. Pleasant Beautiful home. This one, however, is a lot closer and well known to the current population of the city. In 1971, one of the apartments was rented by Edd and Viola King. Fifteen years later (still living in the same apartment) and by then the elected mayor of Mt. Pleasant, Edd King was cruelly shot to death during a city council meeting on Dec. 10, 1986.

Today, the home still is rental apartments.