Dugan's Saloon

About this property

Dugan's Saloon is an historic building located in Grand Mound, Iowa, United States. The building has subsequently housed other businesses and is no longer a saloon. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. William Dugan, who had this building constructed, was born in Ireland in 1868. He immigrated with his parents to the United States five years later. He married Ellen Hughes, whose family were also of Irish ancestry. This building was either his second or third saloon in Grand Mound. It is known he had built another two-story brick building in 1895. The second floor of that building housed a dance hall with a saloon on the first floor. Dance hall saloons were generally seen as places that lacked social integrity as they generally employed women of questionable virtue to entertain the men who patronized them. There is, however, no record of what kind of establishment Dugan's other saloon was. There may have been another business before that one as well. The property on which Dugan built his saloon in 1905 had previously been the Kahler General Store. The store was destroyed in a fire, and he bought the property from the Kahler family in 1902. The second floor of the 1905 building has residential space that was occupied by Dugan, his wife and daughter. He continued to own the 1895 building and he rented it to grocer Herman Lucht. Grand Mound was mostly a German community with some Irish residents as well. After the American Civil War temperance organizations gained in popularity in Clinton County, including among the Germans. In 1908 there were 92 licensed saloons in Clinton County, with 66 located in the City of Clinton alone. Societal attitudes toward the consumption of alcohol were changing. An advertisement that year in the Clinton County Farmers' Institute describes Dugan's establishment as a "dealer in wines, liquors, and cigars." It suggests that the saloon had become a wine room. By 1910, however, the Farmers' Institute does not mention Dugan's establishment. Farmers and Merchants Savings Bank became the tenant in the building in 1912, while the Dugan family continued to live in the second floor apartment. Dugan's obituary credited him as a principal organizer of the new bank. Dugan sold all of his real estate holdings in Grand Mound to Julius Detlef, a local hardware merchant, in 1919. By that time he resided in Winnebago County, Illinois where he was a soft drink manufacturer in Rockford. The family left Rockford sometime around 1921. He died in October 1943 at a farm he owned near Davis Junction, Illinois. His daughter Theresa, who had married Frank Danielson, also resided in Davis Junction.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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