Bob Piper's Corner - July 12, 1987

July 12, 1987

More questions and answers -

Helen Throckmorton, formerly of Derby, wrote asking where the famous Tunis Courter truck gardens were in Chariton. Mr. Courter’s home was just south of the business college and his gardens were where Harold Trumbull lives on South Main Street. They extended back in the Hillcrest area. She has a picture of herself and her father in a buggy at the Courter gardens. According to the notes on the back of the picture, they had driven from Derby to get a bushel of asparagus tips. She said there was a house in the background and the note on the back of the picture said it was Dr. Colbreath’s home. This house still stands and would be the first house south of Harold Trumbull’s. Incidentally, the asparagus tips were one dollar a bushel. Mr. Courter is buried in the Chariton Cemetery, and his stone is a huge red native stone weighing perhaps two tons or more. The inscription on the stone was done by himself, I am sure. Lots of you people had Elsie Newell for your fifth or sixth grade teacher here in Chariton. Elsie was the daughter of Tunis Courter.

An elderly lady from Mason City asked her daughter to stop in when down this way and ask me where the Yocom Hospital was in 1910. It seems this elderly woman was accidentally shot in the arm while hunting and was taken to the Yocom Hospital, situated upstairs on the square. She is right and the hospital was over Piper’s Store, was in charge of Dr. Albert Yocom, Sr. We have pictures of the horse-drawn ambulance at the base of the stairs. Some early pictures show a good size box-like structure up on the roof. This was part of an x-ray machine. Dr. Yocom, Jr., told me he had turned the crank on this machine in the office many, many times to generate electrical current for x-rays.

A lady from Des Moines asked these questions. She is elderly and remembers going to the library upstairs on the square before the present library was built. The library in those days was upstairs where the Rexall Drug Store is now. This was before 1905.

Another question was who was the official mine doctor and where was his office. This was Dr. Biston and his office was over the old Gamble Store location on the west side of the square. He may not have been the doctor for all the mines, but he was for old No. 1 mine, and at least one other mine. She asks about Dr. Fisher, who lived and practiced in Tipperary. He was Dr. Merriam Fisher’s father. If you know where to look up on a hill above the Tipperary Mine, you can see the stepping stone where one could alight from a buggy. Later, Dr. Fisher, M.C., practiced in Williamson and retired in Chariton. His son Merriam was a dentist and first practiced in Williamson and later in Chariton. His office was over the Rexall Drug and later in the building behind the drug store where Dr. Randall is practicing now.