This home was built by a well-to-do family

With the cooperation of the Southeast Iowa Union, the Mt. Pleasant Historic Preservation Commission will be publishing weekly 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 the week following the initial publication.

Last week’s featured home: Payne House, 203 West Second St.

This week’s home was built about 1887 by Martha Brazelton Porter, the almost 70-year-old widow of Col. Asbury Porter, who had passed in 1885 at age 77.

While Porter’s importance to Henry County is significant, including the laying out the towns of both Trenton and Winfield, it is their descendants that interest us at this time.

Following Martha’s death, the 11-room house was purchased by her grandson, Orville Beckwith, and was owned by him at the time of the Mt. Pleasant Beautiful publication in 1909.

Beckwith’s father had married a Porter girl and at her death, married her sister. Orville was one of three boys from the original marriage.

The family was financially well-off, to the point that the three boys were what we would today call trust funders.

The family fortune came primarily from the Western Wheeled Scraper Company, an early Mt. Pleasant manufacturing firm. The company relocated to Illinois in the 1890s, and eventually “Western” merged with Austin Manufacturing to become Austin-Western, one of the better known names in construction machinery in the first half of the 20th century.

They all showed a love for athletics, hunting and fast cars. The newspapers of the time have stories of boating accidents on the Mississippi and fast car trips.

At one point, Orville bested his brother’s Burlington-to-Mt. Pleasant record time. Warren Beckwith had made the trip in 66 minutes, but Orville’s time in his 1909 Rambler was just 50 minutes.

Orville, for a time, managed the Mt. Pleasant White Sox, a semipro baseball team sponsored by local merchants. It is unclear how long he carried this position, or for that matter, how long the team continued to exist.

Orville’s life ended in 1920, at age 53, and his wife and five children divided an estate of $250,000, equal to about $3.5 million today.

The home remained in the Beckwith family until 1944.