By Wendell Nelson

About the first owners of Plover Village’s lovely Greek temple of a house, Charles P. and Mary Rice, there is not much information. That is not surprising. They lived in Plover Village and in this house before Portage County had newspapers, and even the legal records say little about them.

The Empire House Hotel in Plover Village. Charles P. Rice built it in 1847, but it burned down in 1885. Then-owner T. Frank Cooley rebuilt it, and it eventually was renamed the Warner House, after the new owner Horace “Hod” Warner. We have no way of knowing if the original building looked like this.
(Contributed photo)

As we have seen, the earliest – from the 1840s and ‘50s – tax rolls on the piece of land they owned have not survived, and the deeds to their property reveal little about them beyond their names, the fact that they bought and sold the parcel that they built their house on, and the amount of money they paid for that land. And they manage to be missing from the U.S. Census records for 1840 and 1850; apparently they left Portage County before its 1850 census was taken.

Part three of seven

So what we know about Charles and Mary Rice comes primarily from Simon Sherman’s reminiscences. In 1905, Malcolm Rosholt writes, Sherman, “apparently feeling the end of his days at hand,” wrote down his memories of his move almost 50 years earlier from his boyhood home in Massachusetts to Portage County. Rosholt quotes those reminiscences in the

chapter on Sherman, The Diarist, in his 1979 book, “Pioneers of the Pinery,” a collection of his Stevens Point Daily Journal historical articles.

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