This home was built by one of Mt. Pleasant’s most prominent business families

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 Traut House, West Monroe.

The exact date of construction of this week’s house is open to some speculation but it was around 1874.

What is not open to speculation is that the house was built by one of the more prominent business families in late Nineteenth Century Mt. Pleasant. Robert Cole and his wife Mary, a couple on their 50s, built the house on land that had been in the family for some time.

Robert was one of four Cole brothers who operated vast network of lightning rod and pump manufacturing and sale of those products. The company was started in Mt. Pleasant about 1850 with $50 of stock.

By 1875, the company was manufacturing lightning rods in St. Louis and pumps in Greencastle, Indiana. According to a glowing report in the Mount Pleasant Free Press they were producing 150,000 feet of lightning rods and 1,500 pumps per month. A sales force 75 teams blanketed the Midwest marketing the product.

The same report said the company used 22,000 postage stamps a year in their Mt. Pleasant office alone. Needless to say, many of those stamps were probably affixed to printed matter produced by the friendly local print shop at the Free Press.

In 1880, Robert and Mary moved to Council Bluffs where he took over the running of a branch of the company there. Unfortunately, he passed away just a few years later at age 61.

The house “stayed in the family” so to speak. The next occupants were James and Rowena Throop, in-laws to Robert Cole’s brother William.

James Throop was journalist, running the Mount Pleasant Free Press for over 30 years. At his passing in 1923 at age 87, the rival newspaper carried a lengthy column indicating how respected he was and also commenting on the Republican newspaper/Democratic newspaper rivalries that had existed in the past and which no longer existed with newspapers just reporting and not taking a stand on anything!

In 1906, the owners of the house at the time of the Mount Pleasant Beautiful publication, Dr. George Mason and his wife Ida, purchased the house. George Mason was born in Southwest Pennsylvania and the couple was married in 1879.

He taught school at various locations in the Midwest and later did extensive travel writing historical and biographical essays for book publishers.

Tired of traveling, he went to medical school and graduated from the medical college in Keokuk in 1892. His first practice was in Lowell, followed by a time in Trenton.

Following his election as Henry County Auditor, the couple moved to Mt. Pleasant in 1906, as stated. Mason died in 1913 at age 63.