Snapshots of History
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Mount Ayr’s Hawkeye Lumber building in 1994.
BY MIKE AVITT
A man named Grover Hahn visited me at the Mount Ayr Depot Museum this week. Grover’s grandmother was Lillie Rusk who lived just south of the Methodist Church in Mount Ayr. It was an interesting and productive visit which resulted in some donated items and the inspiration for this week’s article.
Grover is related to both the Rusk and Seevers families, both families being active in the contracting and construction business in years gone by.
In the last few years I’ve become more interested in bricklayers, carpenters, and contractors. Clyde and Leonard Rusk built many houses in Ringgold County, but John Harvey Seevers owned a lumber yard that was one of three yards in 1900.
Seevers, like most lumber yards, handled coal and that was big business.
Mount Ayr had two lumber yards that go back further than my research.
One was on the southwest corner of the square, where the First Christian Church is today. This yard appears to have been started by Isaac Keller and closed in 1902. The other yard was located where Hy-Vee is today and appears on an 1886 plat map as “Cole & Pratt” Lumber Yard. By 1893 that yard was under the name “W. B. Ballew.” Ballew sold out to Wm. Burnside & Company in 1901.
J. H. Seevers started his lumber yard about 1896 and it was located in the north central part of the block that borders the north side of the square. About 1903 he moved to where Jamie’s Coffee Mill is today. In January, 1902, Hawkeye Lumber bought the yard where Hy-Vee is and now there were only two yards.
There had been a very large building boom during the 1890s but things had slowed on the construction front.
In 1907 J. H. Seevers sold his business to Hawkeye Lumber and Mount Ayr would have only one yard until…1910! That’s when Mount Ayr Lumber Company (later Dalbey Lumber) opened just south of the southwest corner of the square. In September 1918, Hawkeye Lumber hired Roy Caldwell to be their manager. On September 1, 1947 Roy retired from Hawkeye only to go to work for Dalbey Lumber after one week off work.
How do you like that?
In December 1980, Joe Murphy and Jack Garrity bought Country Boys (formerly Dalbey Lumber) and Murphy bought Garrity’s interest in the firm in January 1983. Soon after Joe bought Hawkeye Lumber. The last time I saw Hawkeye Lumber in the Mount Ayr Record-News was July 24, 1986. And we’ve had one lumber yard ever since.
