By Wendell Nelson

Edward Gallet, the last owner we discussed, never lived in the Plover house, but bought it as a real-estate speculation. He cleared a $25 profit four months after he bought it, by selling it to Frank Walker for $800, according to Warranty Deed Volume 78, page 233, dated Feb. 11, 1905.

Major/Dr. George D. Whiteside, taken while he directed Red Cross work in establishing hospitals in European countries during and after World War I.
(Contributed photo)

Walker and his wife, Lettie, sold the house three years later for $1,000 (doing much better than Edward Gallet) to Mark F. Pierce, a Sept. 22, 1908, Warranty Deed (Volume 97, page 264) recorded.

All we know of Frank Walker is that in the preceding May, he “closed out the L.S. Walker store” in Plover. Also, he “expects to go through to the coast and anticipates locating, probably in Idaho,” according to the May 2, 1908, Daily Journal. He does not appear in the 1900 U.S. Census.

(This may be the same Walker family that ran general stores in Almond Village and Plainfield; Bert Walker operated the one in Almond, and in 1904, built a fine house that still stands on Elm Street there.)

Mark – or Marcus – Pierce owned the Plover house for over seven years, but it is unclear if he and his family lived in it. He “engaged in the drug business” for “30 years between 1880 and 1910,” his obituary in the Oct. 13, 1927, Daily Journal says.

In 1915, Pierce sold the house to Dr. George D. Whiteside, a physician, for $1,000, exactly what Pierce had paid for it in 1908 (Volume 107, page 638, dated Nov. 20, 1915).

But another mystery appears. The Nov. 16, 1910, Gazette reported on Whiteside’s move to Plover, five years before the date of the deed.

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