This week in Mount Pleasant
- Taco Tuesday at Mount Pleasant Christian School
Tue, Nov 3 · 5 PM · Mt. Pleasant Christian School 1505 E. Washington
About Mount Pleasant
Settlers put down roots on this rise in Henry County in 1833, and within a decade Methodist families had won a charter for a school that grew into Iowa Wesleyan, the first college in Iowa to teach women and men together. That early bet on learning shaped the town: in the brick Union Block downtown, Arabella Mansfield became the first woman in the country licensed to practice law in 1869, and the hall upstairs hosted speakers such as Frederick Douglass. When fire badly damaged the Union Block in 2011, neighbors raised the money to bring it back, and its third-floor ballroom opened again for community gatherings in 2014. Each Labor Day weekend the Midwest Old Threshers Reunion, held since 1950, fills the grounds with hissing steam engines, antique tractors and a narrow-gauge railroad, and in winter the same grounds glow with a two-mile drive-through Festival of Lights. Today about 9,300 people call the Henry County seat home, where the 1914 courthouse, the 1923 Masonic Temple theater on Main Street and the 1912 brick depot on the Amtrak line still anchor everyday life.