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"No Situation Could Make Me More Happy" ~ Reconstruction: 1814 - 1829 65 pioneering spirit that drew his younger brother out west, but with his happy and settled life in Mount Pleasant, and the fact that he wrote that letter to his brother, incidentally on his 49th birthday, his pioneering days were gladly over. However, as William well knew, the task of reconstruction fell to his generation. His counterpart in the Ellis family, John, also a young man of 19 during the trek from Pennsylvania in 1798-99, received an added bonus in the hard years after the war. In 1822, his wife Deborah Secord received her long awaited land grant as the daughter of a Loyalist and her brother Asa received his farm just south of Mount Pleasant in 1826. Despite the loss of people like John and Ardillacy Sturgis, there still endured a sense of future prosperity for the area as the long A Sturgis house, built c1820, said to be the first brick house in Mount Pleasant, c1960. The plan of two large rooms on each floor and the doorcase with its elegant fanlight date to c1825, but village historian M. Smyth conjectures that the house dates to c1829 when the Erie Canal opened, providing easier transportation for building materials such as brick. The picture shows bricked-in second storey windows. The house was on the William Sturgis farm on Lot 8W and is attributed to the Sturgis family. Eloquent now in its absence, this home was demolished in the 1980s.