This was a new home when the original ‘Mount Pleasant Beautiful’ was published

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 Pepper House at 504 East Henry.

This week we feature a home that was quite new when Mount Pleasant Beautiful was published in 1909.

James Hall bought a lot near the railroad tracks in April of 1905 and contemporary accounts of the building progress suggest that Hall, his wife Nellie (Leach), and their two children moved in by the end of the year.

Hall was a second generation Henry County farmer who continued to operate the family farm in Marion Township after he and Nellie moved to town. At some point, he and his family also merged the Leach family farm into their agricultural operations.

While the Hall family owned and lived in the property for 56 years, perhaps the most notorious owners were Professor David Burr and his wife Anne who bought the house in 1966 after Burr was hired as a drama teacher at Iowa Wesleyan.

Two years later he inaugurated a Summer Theater Festival on the campus which presented three repertory productions of classic plays. In a “dramatic” move less than a year later, the Executive Committee of the College Board announced the cancellation of all courses in drama for the 1969 summer session and the following academic year.

For his part, Burr publically made clear that he had refused to accept the guidelines for his work as given to him by Dr. Louis Hasselmayer, the chair of the English, Speech, and Drama Department.

According to later newspaper accounts, the story revolved around a student’s play, Fulvia, which had been produced on campus earlier in the year.

The paper reported that public and private reaction to the play had been “violent” and prompted Dr. Hasselmayer’s guidelines for future productions.

David Burr refused to accept the censorship and indicated he should have his own drama department, answerable to no one.

With no compromise in sight, the programs were cancelled, and Burr paid a full year for which he was under contract. That and monies involving the cancelled summer program amounted to a cost of about $17,000 to the college.

Burr and his wife (something of a playwright herself) moved to New York and an attempt to trace their life beyond this point has been unsuccessful.

The following year (1970), the house was purchased by Alpha Xi Delta and it became their chapter house for the next 24 years. Purchased in 1974 by Don and Martha Whaley, the house was restored by them, work that was recognized by the Mount Pleasant Historic Preservation Commission as “outstanding.”

Don Whaley passed away in 2017, and his widow continues to occupy the home.