Snapshot of History by Mike Avitt

BY MIKE AVITT I don’t have the date of this photo, but it was probably August 1966 when Mabel McCullough Rice and her son Gary McCullough had an open house at their new car lot in Mount Ayr. The business, specializing in farm equipment, was now a dealer for Chrysler and Plymouth. I scooped corn…

By Mike Avitt It took me several attempts to find the construction of this building. Had there been a large advertisement in the newspaper, announcing the formal opening, I would have found it sooner. Instead, I found a paragraph deep in the July 4, 1918 Mt. Ayr Journal. Brothers Douglas “Dug” and Fielding Sullivan, appear…

By Mike Avitt This article was interesting to research but also frustrating because I failed to find all the answers. Okay, most of the answers. Let’s look at the three churches of Delphos. The first church built in Delphos was the original Baptist Church in 1884, four years after Delphos was established. It was built…

BY MIKE AVITT I took this week’s photo in 2007. The convenience store had been closed for about a year by then. The Farm Crisis of the early 1980s put retail businesses in a tailspin, but Kellerton had a bit of a business boom. We will look at some of what happened there beginning with…

BY MIKE AVITT Motorcycles have been around southern Iowa for 120 years. There’s not much information in the old newspapers about motorcycles, but I found that Lawrence Campbell, a 1913 rural mail carrier, had a wreck in which his motorcycle, and all the mail he was carrying, were burned up in the accident. Lawrence escaped…

This week’s picture comes from an early 1950s postcard. The August 10, 1950 Record-News tells us about the beginning of the Clinton Motel. The motel was owned and built by the McCullough Motor Company which was owned by Clinton “Whitey” Rice and his wife Mabel McCullough Rice. Materials for the 244’ x 25’ motel came…

BY MIKE AVITT The Conoco station was closed on August 11, 1998 when this photo was taken. The event was a fund-raising car wash to pay for a trip to the Fiesta Bowl. Korbie Rinehart, Shannon Norris, Josh Rusk, Rachel Derscheid, Megan Petersohn, and Josh Smith performed in the Fiesta Bowl football game in 1999…

BY MIKE AVITT Mount Ayr High School’s first football field was located in Sheldon Heights. I have read that the football team also played at Saville’s (baseball) field but I don’t know where that was located. Chautauqua was held at Sheldon Heights prior to houses being built there beginning in 1913. In 1923, the Mount…

BY MIKE AVITT The Diagonal newspaper plant burned in December 1917 taking the past newspapers with it. We still know a great deal of Diagonal’s early history because of the coverage in newspapers from Mount Ayr, Clearfield, Shannon City, et al. Most of the information I will share this week comes from the November 17,…