Kellerton’s first high school burned in February of 1895 and a new brick school was built that year. The new school building was 52 feet square, two stories high, and opened in December 1895. It was obsolete in twenty years. In July 1915, F. X. White received the contract for the construction of Kellerton’s new…
Read MoreBY MIKE AVITT We received a donation to the Mount Ayr Depot Museum recently. The donation consisted of documents, diplomas, land transfers, deeds, and financial statements. I saw one dated 1866. Let’s view some early history. There is an account in the January 20, 1881 Ringgold Record newspaper about Charles Schooler, the first white…
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BY MIKE AVITT It’s 2023. Mount Ayr is less than two years away from its sesquicentennial (150th anniversary). I’m often asked when Mount Ayr was established. It was established in 1855 with the opening of the Mount Ayr Post Office. But it wasn’t incorporated until 1875. Mount celebrated its centennial in 1975, one hundred years…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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