BY MIKE AVITT I’ve written about this photo before but I have further information. The picture comes from the Orr Fisher collection and was taken in 1939. The December 2, 1875 Ringgold Record newspaper describes the construction of this building, the buildings to the west, and the occupants. There were three buildings built at the…

BY MIKE AVITT Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and say, “why did that happen?”. It happens to me every night. By 1917, every incorporated town in Ringgold County had built a brick high school except Knowlton, Ellston, and Beaconsfield. In 1917 only Mount Ayr had electricity, but Diagonal soon…

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…

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…

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…