This home was once part of the State Reform School for Girls

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 Campbell House at 302 East Washington Street.

This week’s feature is not only interesting for the historic home built in the 1850s but for other uses for the site and for the wealthy owners.

The site is part of 80 acres purchased by Rev. Samuel Hutton in 1841 for the sum of $1,500.50. For the curious, that is just under $52,500 in today’s dollars. Hutton was a Baptist preacher who had come with three sons in 1835, established a claim and built a log cabin. Later that year he brought the balance of his family from Illinois.

Samuel Hutton is credited with being instrumental in establishing a Baptist Church in Mt. Pleasant. Our sources indicate he was in the pumps and lightning rod business. He died in 1857 at age 72 in Wayland.

In 1856, Samuel’s son Thomas, sold about 63 acres of the original plot, which by then included the substantial home, to Timothy and Sarah Whiting. They were in their 40s and moved to Mt. Pleasant from Bath, New York. A year later he was one of the founders of the Mt. Pleasant branch of the Iowa State Bank and Timothy was thought to be one of the richest men in town. Seven years later he was named president of the bank, reorganized as the National State Bank.

Although Timothy seemed to enjoy his morning walks from the west side to his downtown office, in 1875 they moved to an in-town home. Three years later, the State Reform School for Girls moved to the Whiting property, leasing it for five years according to news reports which also indicated the property had well-constructed buildings, implying that Whiting had probably built the 84-girl dormitory building in anticipation the state lease.

The school had previously been in Salem where it been in leased quarters; the White Manual Labor Training School. In Salem it had been run by Lorenzo Lewelling, Salem native, Quaker, abolitionist and eventually the Governor of Kansas.

Just two years after the move to Mt. Pleasant, the school was again moved to Mitchellville, leaving the Whiting property with an 84-person dormitory just adjacent to the historic home.

Whiting then sold the property to William Bruning, an unmarried, retired Indiana dry goods merchant who had relatives in Mt. Pleasant. He was 57 years old and by the time of his death in 1900 was characterized as the richest man in Henry County.

Bruning leased the property in 1882 to Joseph and Fannie Thompson who set up a successful greenhouse, garden center which the operated while sharing the property with Bruning. At his death they purchased the property and continued to operate the “gardens.” The 1909 Mount Pleasant Beautiful pictures the extensive greenhouses and also the old dorm shows up immediately behind the house.

In 1941 the property was purchased by M. L. and Suzanne Dickson, who razed the dormitory and made a number of upgrades and repairs to the home. It remained in their family until 2020.