The City of Mount Pleasant was incorporated in 1900. We find that information contained in the Mt. Pleasant City Council minutes provides an invaluable insight into understanding the problems our first city fathers faced in establishing a new city.
When building this website, we are very concerned that the information that we present is accurate. The only way to insure this is to research government records for each topic when possible. Therefore, we digitized the Mount Pleasant City Council minutes (among other documents) to build a searchable database to create part of our background research materials for this website. We hand-typed the minutes word for word from the original books. You will see underscores ( ____ ) in some of the minutes below. The underscores appear exactly as shown in the original minute books. Due to file space required to reproduce signatures as a graphic, we noted people who signed the minutes as (Signed By) and (Attested By). The date of each council meeting is shown first in bold type, followed by the page number in the original minute book where the information was found. Under the date of each meeting, we added brief notes of business conducted in bold type, followed by the exact text of the minutes.
Due to size, it is impossible to include all the minutes from 1900 to present on the website. The older minute books consist of 28 bound volumes ranging from approximately two inches to three inches thick each. Many additional minutes kept after the computer age are in digital form consisting of large files.
However, we thought that you might enjoy reading Volume I of the Mt. Pleasant City Council minutes, which includes the original election to incorporate the township and each council meeting through the year of 1903.
When reading the minutes, keep in mind how people lived during the time they were written. Do you think that the "Wild West" was only in the movies? Mount Pleasant was incorporated not too long after the last days of the "Wild West." Horses and wagons were used for transportation. Livestock ran loose in the streets. Common city services that you take for granted did not exist and had to be established. These include, but are not limited to high quality running water, a sewer system, and trash collection. Electricity, generated at the local ice plant, was available, but not every house and building was equipped to use it yet. There was no fire department. If a building caught fire, the only way to try to put it out was a "bucket brigade" that drew water from wells by hand to throw on the fire. Therefore, fire was an extremely serious danger. Unlike today, there was no City Hall (it wasn't built until 1917) or city jail to house offenders. Council meetings were held in the Mayor's office. Until the City of Mount Pleasant was incorporated, the Titus County Sheriff provided all Titus County law enforcement and housed all the prisoners.
Early Council minutes were much more detailed than present ones. Early minutes listed each bill owed by the City, which isn't possible today. They itemize each bill owed and the amount paid. The early prices shown give you an idea of how much the U.S. currency has been inflated in the last 100+ years. In simple dollar denominations, the entire city was operated then on less money than most single households are today. Immediately after incorporating, the city had to levy and collect taxes to raise the funds necessary to pay the bills. The City's first tax ordinance is liste in the council minutes.
You must keep in mind that the simple dollar figures shown are relative to the purchasing power of the dollar in 1900. In other words, it took approximately $24.61 in 2007 dollars to purchase the same amount of goods or services that one 1900 dollar would purchase. For example, in 1897 the entire two story Titus County court house (complete with the clock tower) was built for around $21,000, less than the price of most new cars today. However, in 1897 that $21,000 bought the same amount of goods as approximately $516,887.00 would have purchased in 2007.
By reading the early minutes, you can learn the names of early city officials and employees. You can also see how they solved the problems involved in changing a town that offered no services into an orderly and organized city.
Dial-up Visitors: These are very large text pages and may be slow to download depending on connection speed.
Click on a blue link below or a blue number on the menu above to read the Mt. Pleasant City Council Minutes:
