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"Charmed With Its Loveliness" ~ Late Century: 1860s - 1890s 189 fulfilled the dairy needs of the district while Robert Eadie dealt in dry goods and Thomas Racey, son of the Squire, supplied the gardening needs for the district from his nursery. Tailors J. W. Tennant and G. Shurman, along with shoemakers George Bingham and John Raw kept the villagers well outfitted in the fashions for every season and for every occasion. The village received it mails daily at 10:00 p.m., dispatching all outgoing correspondence at the same time at the store of merchant William Jones who took over as postmaster from Abraham Cooke in 1857. Cooke, the "merchant prince" of the village for the past decades, would not be in the village to greet our stroller. He died the year before in 1864 leaving behind his wife Eleanor and their children and grandchildren to carry on his enterprising work for the economic, social and religious well-being of Mount Pleasant. As the village cabinetmaker John Randall Ellis might have constructed Abraham's coffin, an unfortunate but necessary job that usually fell to a community's carpenter, although the task might also have fallen to Mount Pleasant's other cabinetmaker, John Soules, who lived with his wife Eliza and six children in the village. Abraham's son, Dr. A.H. Cooke cared for the medical needs of the community. The village's union grammar school, the new name for the Nelles Academy, established in 1860, averaged about 75 pupils, taught by Walter Briggs since 1863. Walter's brother Albert also served as a respected teacher in Mount Pleasant. Their musically inclined younger brother Alexander delighted worshippers at All Saints as the church's first organist. Walter's counterpart in the junior department of the school, Miss E. Wray, taught the younger students. Our stroller might also have noticed the new house built for farmer and merchant Archibald McEwen in 1863 by J. Lloyd Jones. McEwen had emigrated from Scotland more than 30 years before, being welcomed into the village and into business by Abraham Cooke. In much the same way that Cooke welcomed McEwen decades before, the village welcomed Irish immigrant John Devlin and his wife Sarah Jarden in 1863. The Devlins, in their late 40s, had first settled at Oakland and now set up a farm in Mount Pleasant for their family. Finally, our stroller could stop at the "Mount Pleasant Hotel," also