Phelps, George T.

PHELPS

Posted By: Joyce Hickman (email)
Date: 1/12/2009 at 13:54:40

George T. Phelps

(From the 1883 History of Pottawattamie County, Iowa, by J. H. Keatley, p.47, Council Bluffs)
George T. Phelps, Ogden House, Council Bluffs, Iowa. The gentlemanly proprietor of the large and popular hotel, the Ogden House, took cahrge of that hotel in 1876. His genial disposition and happy faculty of understanding the needs of the inner man, most thoroughly render him that hard-to-be-found mortal - an efficient and universally-liked landlord. Mr. Phelps was born in Chatham, N. Y., in 1842. His father was a railroad contractor and moved to Massachusetts when our subject was one year old, to fulfill a contract there. In 1860, his business took him to Illinois, from whence he returned to Massachusetts on the breaking-out of the war. Here George T. enlisted as a private in the Twenty-sixth Massachusetts Volunteers, and was discharged June 21, 1865. He entered the service as a private, and came out as Quartermaster Sergeant. After this, he was engaged for one year in the wholesale feed and grain business. He followed in the footsteps of his father, and came to Council Bluffs in 1866, as a contractor on the Chicago, Burlington & St. Joe Railroad; and, on its completion assumed the general management of this division of the road, in which capacity he continued until the spring of 1869, when he went East as a contractor on different roads in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. He returned to Oakland, Pottawattamie Co., Iowa, in 1873, staying there three years, when he assumed the proprietorship of the Ogden House, which had but shortly before been rebuilt after the fire of 1875. The Ogden House averages sixty arrivals per day, and has, besides, many regular boarders. Mr. Phelps was married in the spring of 1869, to Miss Anna Baldwin, daughter of John T. Baldwin, of this city.