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"Charmed With Its Loveliness" ~ Late Century: 1860s - 1890s 209 family name in the village and the family enterprises including shipping grain and operating a feed and coal supply store. The village continued to play an important role in the economic lives of its residents, even with many commercial interests moving to larger urban areas such as Brantford, which earned the status of city in 1877. The local general store endured as a constant fixture in Mount Pleasant. The mercantile business that had at one time been in the hands of the Foster family, the Hardy family and the Eadie family was finally sold to a new family in the village, the Devlins. George Devlin, a young man of Irish descent living with his wife Cecelia Silverthorn in Mount Pleasant, was a clerk in the Hardy store and eventually purchased it from its owner in 1879. In buying the store in his early 30s he set up a prosperous future for himself and his family. George's brothers Hugh and Robert also helped him with the store in the early years, though Robert and his wife Margaret Brunton later established their own grocery in Brantford. Their sister Elizabeth married Epaphras Phelps, grandson of the original Epaphras, and lived nearby. A copy of a bill from the Devlin store in 1897, long after George had established the enterprise in his own right, advertised that he was a "dealer in goods, ready made clothing, Lt. Col. James Knight Goold, Senior Paymaster of the British Army, second owner of the Tennant octagon. Goold is said to have been a guest at the house when in Mount Pleasant on military duties and declared he wanted to retire there, which he did in 1882, Tennant having conveniently died in 1878, leaving the property to his widow. This picture of Goold is reproduced from a card he sent to his wife, Charlotte de Moll Berczy, daughter of the first postmaster at York (Toronto). Goold was "a splendid type of the old school, courtly in his bearing, affable and generous." He died at age 93, and is buried in All Saints Cemetery.