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- Dixon Evening Telegraph, Dixon, Illinois May 29, 1913
MRS. ORVIS SELLS THE NACHUSA HOUSE
Historic Hostelry Will Pass Into The Hands of Indianan.
THOUSANDS FOR REMODELING
M.E. Rice Plans to Spend $22,000 in Making Building Into Modern Hostelry.
Within a short time, unless some unlooked for complication arises, the Nachusa house in this city will pass into the hands of M.E. Rice of Fort Wayne, Ind., who will at once after acquiring the property, expend over $22,000 in remodeling the place.
For some time negotiations have been pending between Mr. Rice and Mrs. Frank E. Orvis, owner, who is touring Japan and now Mrs. Orvis has cabled acceptance of the terms of Mr. Rice and has stated that papers conveying the property will be forwarded at once.
Wants a Home.
The fact that Mr. Rice is about to come into possession of the property means much for Dixon, as it foretells that the hostelry will be changed in to a modern metropolitan hotel. Mr. Rice is not purchasing the hotel as an investment, but rather to make a permanent home for himself of which he can be proud. All of the interior is to be rebuilt. Telephones and running water will be installed in every room, while the first floor will be equipped with tile floors and modern entrance. The wash rooms will be moved to the basement and numerous other changes will be made.
It is thought the instruments conveying the property will arrive in about ten days, following which Mr. Rice will make further statements of his plans.
Dixon Evening Telegraph, Dixon, Illinois February 12, 1931
NEW OWNERS OF HISTORIC HOTEL ANNOUNCE PLANS
Improvements To Give Dixon Hotel with Hundred Rooms
Through a deal consummated late yesterday the historic Nachusa Tavern changed ownership. Manager Don Billig, who for the past few years has managed the hotel announcing today that the Hi-Way Hotel Company of Freeport had purchased the building and property from M.E. Rice of Elgin, the consideration not being made public.
With the announcement of the change in ownership, Manager Billig stated that plans were drawn for an extended rebuilding program. The entire front of the structure will be torn down to be replaced by a unique front facing on the Lincoln Highway of the design of an Old English Tavern. While the plans for the improvement program, which is estimated will result in the expenditure of approximately $100,000, have been drawn, no contract have been awarded but it is anticipated that the reconstruction work will start during the summer months.
The historic background which surrounds the Nachusa Tavern is not to be entirely obliterated which is probably best explained in the statement today by Manager Billig:
Manager's Plans.
"In the reconstruction prgram, it is the plan to carry out the old tavern style of construction and furnishing insofar as is possible and by no means to remove the historic background which has surrounded the Nachusa Tavern in Dixon over a period of many years. Just when the reconstruction work will start we are . . . . . [the article continues but I do not have the copy)
Dixon Evening Telegraph, Dixon, Illinois March 29, 1944
Nachusa Is Sold: Group Will Build
Evening Telegraph and L.G. Rorer Purchase Historic Hostelry
Dixon is to have a new hotel as soon as building conditions will permit its construction. The new hotel will fill a long felt need and will give this city a splendid new and modern hostelry which will compare favorably with anything to be found in cities of Dixon's size or much larger. The Evening Telegraph and Leonard G. Rorer have jointly purchased from M.E. Rice the Hotel Nachusa and plan to form a syndicate of Dixon stockholders who will either remodel the present historic old hotel building or raze it and erect a modern new hotel on the same site.
Known Far and Wide
Mr. Rice, who has owned and operated the hotel for so many years and in such a reputable manner, will not give up possession of the property until some later date and will rent the property from its new owners for an undetermined time. The sale entails only the bulding and land and does not include furniture or equipment.
Under the management of Mr. E. Rice, general and ?????? host, the Nachusa has become known far and wide as a famous and historic landmark. It was built over 100 years ago.
Democrat & Chronicle, A Gannet Rochester, New York newspaper May 20, 1948
VERY LUCKY
M.E. Rice, an old-time showman, drove into Rochester in the rain in a large ar the other afternoon, and drove from town down to Ontario Beach Park to see the place where he virtually got his start on the road, if not to high fame, to substantial fortune.
That was 60 years ago, and Mr. Rice, who is now 83, was 23 years old.
Dr. C.L. Reynolds, of the Rochester Guidance Clinic, who came from a town in Illinois in which one of Mr. Rice's three hotels is located, and who is an old friend of the former showman, told me about Mr. Rice and I called 3upon him in the Hotel Seneca. He is a slim, wispy, kindly little man, who doesn't look his four score and three, and who had been touring over a large section of the country in his fancy car, with a bright young man as chauffeur-companion.
"In my 30 years in show business, I was on the go most of the time," Mr. Rice said. "Now, though I am in the hotel business. I have things so well arranged that I can travel a good deal." He smiled. "The old habits of the trouper are pretty deep in me, and each year I put a lot of miles behind me. We rolled up a few thousand on this trip, and in the Winter we toured the South. I did want to stop off in Rochester to see my friend, Dr. Reynolds, and to have a look at the place where I really got my start."
As a lad in his teens, Mr. Rice learned the printer's trade in Fairbury, Neb., and followed this then nomadic calling through a section of the Midwest and up and down the Missouri River. He worked for such papers as the Omaha Bee, the Topeka Capitol, the Lincoln Journal, the Leavenworth Times, and the Sioux City Journal. His last newspaper job was in Wamego, Kansas. There he met the manager of a traveling repertoire company, who engaged him as press agent. He made a season's tour with the troupe, and then went to work for C. Coup, who, Mr. Rice said, was the man who built New York's first Madison Square Garden, and persuaded P.T. Barnum to quit his New York museum and launch out in circus business.
Coup was an elderly man at the time and close to the end of a long career as a showman. He had rigged up a museum in six railway cars in which, under the billing, "Coup's Six Enchanted Rolling Palaces," he was touring the eastern section of the country. The show was a good one, Rice said; too good, in fact, to be profitable. Entering the rear car and emerging through the front door of the head car, the patrons became so engrossed in the exhibits that they would stand an unconscionable long time in the aisles, which became so choked that hundreds of propsective ticket holders were unable to get in. The show folded in Buffalo. Coup, however, had another attraction, a troupe of 20 wonderfully trained horses. He suggested that Mr. Rice book the horse act into Rochester.
"I put the horse act on in front of a big hotel at Ontario Beach (probably the old Ontario Beach Hotel), but for the first six days the weather was so cold that scarcely anyone came down to the lakeside," Mr. Rice related. "On Sunday, the seventh day, it turned very warm, and we sold the seats time and time again. I had made an arrangement with the hotel management to take what we called 'first money' for the first 200 chairs, and I made $450. I used that money to buy into a touring repertoire company which paid off well. After that I operated numerous theatrical ventures, and everyone of them was profitable. But I really got my start in Rochester. It was along time ago, but I have a sort of sentimental feeling about the city. My, how Ontario Beach has changed. Only the lake itself looks the same.
Mr. Rice said modestly that he never had any big shows, only small, profitable ones. The theatrical "road" was then in its glory, and the cost of moving a stage troupe from town to town, and maintaining its members during their stand, was nominal. In one town in Georgia he lodged and fed, three meals a day each, a company of 14 performers all for $9 a day, Mr. Rice admitted that that was rather exceptional but a performer could live very comfortably on #1 a day, room and board.
Entering a new town, Mr. Rice always insisted on a parade, and the male performers were required to play in the band - double in brass, as it was called. He had another and novel scheme for advertising his productions, which he believes was the forerunner of the present day newspaper comic strip. He first introduced this during the season he toured Wood and Ward in "The Two Merry Tramps."
"I would send an advance agent into a town four weeks before the show came in," he explained. "He would buy space on the front page of the local newspaper, and for 24 days a plate showing Wood and Ward in one of their comic antics whould be inserted in this space. The series had a sequence like the modern comic strip. I think Buster Brown was the first newspaper comic, and after that Happy Hooligan. We, I think were a little ahead of both."
In time Mr. Rice entered partnership with E.D. Stair, later owner of the Detroit Free Press, and a millionaire several times over. Stair started his career as the publisher of a country weekly in Morenci, Mich., a town of less than 2,000 persons. Small theatrical companies in that part of the country for some time had made a practice of having Stair's shop print their programs and billing. One of these, a lowly wagon show, with a sparkling young woman named Miss Jessie Bonsteele, as leading player, had fallen arrears on its program bills to the tune of $80. Stair went out to collect his debt, and ended up owning the show. Miss Bonsteele in time became the most famous stock actress in the country, and Stair presently built a theater for her in Detroit, which bore her name. That was Stair's first introduction to show business in which, together with his newspaper, he made a vast fortune.
Mr. Rice, retiring from the road, took over a theater in Huntington, W. Va., made a success of that in one season, and then in partnership with Mr. Stair built the Majestic Theater in Fort Wayne, Ind. In this house for several years he played all the great people of the day: Minnie Maddern Fisk, William Faversham, Olga Nethersole, Viola Allen, Ethel Barrymore, John Drew, Mrs. Leslie Carter, May Robeson and Eva Tanguay, the last named the only performer, Mr. Rice said, "With whom I ever had any trouble. She refused to enter the theater by the back stage, and each day went in through the front of the house, vaulted over the orchestra railing, and scrambled up on the stage. She was a terror."
He once booked the sensational French musical comedy star, the late Mile. Gaby Deleys into the Majestic. Her beauty, perhaps more than her talents, had so enarmored King Emmanuel of Portugal that he tossed away his throne in order madly to pursue her over the European continent, during which he virtually showered her with the royal jewels. These she had with her on her American tour, and Mr. Rice, having heard of their prodigal and glittering beauty, asked her manager if he might see them. The violatile Gaby received him in her dressing room.
"You may not only see them, you may hold them," She told Mr. Rice. He held out his hand. "No, no," the actress said, "not one hand, two hands," and even two could scarcely contain a bijouterie valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When talking pictures came in, Mr. Rice exited from show business. His next venture, as profitable as the others, was into the hotel business, and today he has hosteleries in Dixon, Sterling, and DeKalb, Ill., all doing very nicely indeed.
Mr. Rice says he has been very lucky.
Sterling News Gazette, Sterling, Illinois November 9, 1954
MILTON E. RICE, STERLING HOTEL PROPRIETOR, DIES
Milton E. Rice, 89, prominent hotelman for more than 40 years died at 7:45 p.m. Monday following a brief illness.
Mr. Rice, who operated the Lincoln Hotel in Sterling, during his years as hotelman ahd establishments in Sterling, Dixon, Elgin, DeKalb and Freeport.
He was born Oct. 28, 1865 in Westville, Ind. and came to Illinois when a young man. He was preceded in death by his wife, who passed away in January of 1948.
Mr. Rice observed his 89th birthday Thursday, Oct. 28 when members of his family gathered at the Lincoln Hotel for a dinner party.
He is survived by three daughters and two sons, Mrs. Keith Benson Sr., of Sterling; Mrs. Carl Degenhart, St. Charles, and Mrs. Grover McDonald, Dixon; Roy Rice, DeKalb, and Lee Rice, Tucason, Ariz. Ten grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren also survive.
Funeral services were conducted at 2 p.m. Tuesday at the Trouth Funeral Home, with Rev. Vernon Jones, rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church of Dixon, officiating.
A memorial service will be conducted later.
Dixon Evening Telegraph, Dixon, Illinois November 9, 1954
M.E. RICE, HOTEL, DIES AT 89
Milton E. Rice, 89, well-known retired hotel owner and one-time owner of the Nachusa House, Dixon, died at 7:45 p.m. Monday in Sterling after a brief illness. He made his home in the Lincoln Hotel, Sterling.
Funeral services were held at 2 p.m. today in the Trouth Funeral Home, Sterling, with the Rev. Vernon L.S. Jones, pastor of St. Luke's Episcopal church, Dixon, officiatiing. A memorial service will be held later.
Mr. Rice was an operator of hotels for more than 40 years. In addition to the Nachusa House, he operated hotels in Elgin, DeKalb and Freeport.
He was born Oct. 28, 1865 in Westville, Ind. and came to Illinois as a young man. His wife died in January, 1948.
Survivors include three daughters, Mrs. Grover McDonald, Dixon, Mrs. Keith Benson Sr., Sterling, and Mrs. Carl Degenhardt, St. Charles, two sons, Roy, DeKalb and Lee, Tucson, Ariz.; 10 grandchilren and 10 great grandchildren.
Illinois Certificate of Death
Greenwood Crematorium, Rockford, Illinois, Certificate of Cremation
Information on Milton Evans Rice's and Mary "Minnie" (Jones) Rice's children from: Keith W. Benson, Jr., P.O. Box 577, Sterling, Illinois 61081 November 1999
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