This home was built by the longtime publisher of the Mt. Pleasant News

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 Jericho House, 302 N. Main St.

This week’s featured home was built in 1900 by Charles and Lillian Rogers. Although they kept the home only a few years, Rogers became a Mt. Pleasant “institution” serving as publisher of the Mt. Pleasant Daily News and the renamed Mt. Pleasant News from 1891 to his retirement in 1961.

He died a year later at the age of 94. He was honored by the Iowa Press Association by being named a Master-Editor in 1940, the Association’s highest honor.

His regular column, “The Bystander’s Notes” was noted for his critical comments on community affairs. In addition to his busy newspaper activities, he served on numerous boards around the city and also as postmaster for a period of years in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The house was built by the firm of Whitney & Bergdahl, a partnership that built a number of buildings familiar to today’s community including the 1912 train depot, the old city hall, Saundera School and the original portion of today’s middle school.

The home was purchased in 1905 by Martha Seeley. She and her late husband, a very successful Lee County farmer, had constructed the Seeley YMCA on Jefferson Street in honor of a deceased son.

After being converted to a high school in 1920, it burned in 1932. In 1935, the current post office was built on the lot. Martha was 84 when she purchased the house and was the owner at the time of the 1909 Mt. Pleasant Beautiful publication. She died three years later.

Soon after, Seeley’s death the property was purchased by Mt. Pleasant druggist Herbert Waugh. Interestingly, this was the same time that Waugh, along with several other city druggists, was involved in court cases surrounding their sale of spirits.

Waugh and others paid substantial fines and lost their ability to sell spirits for several years. In fact by the time that prohibition expired, the Volstead Act prohibiting the sales of spirits generally throughout the country was just around the corner.

Since he carried on as a druggist in Mt. Pleasant for 50 years, there was apparently no permanent damage done to his reputation by the “spirits” problem.

The Waughs continued to own the property for 50 years. Herbert died in 1955 and Martha in 1964, two years after selling the property. Subsequently in the 1970s the Kennedy Chiropractic practice along with the Kennedy family occupied the house. In 1987 Denis Staples took over the business.

The home is currently rented out as several apartments.