Biography: Mortimer Fleet
April 27, 1858–June 2, 1948
President: 1896-1899
Mortimer Fleet was an Illinois-born journalist, civic leader, and western pioneer whose work and adventures carried him from the Mississippi River Valley to the developing communities of the American West. Born in Duncan Township, Henry County, Illinois, he married Helen Richmond in 1883 and spent his early adult years in the Hampton–Moline area.
In 1891 Fleet came to Moline and joined the staff of The Moline Dispatch, an experience he later recalled with humor—including an oft-told newsroom moment when a boy burst in to report that “a wagonload of hay” had overturned on Fifteenth Street, only to admit it was his own. Around this same period, Fleet was active in Hampton village affairs, appearing in local election coverage in the late 1890s and early 1900s and becoming known to readers through letters signed with the pen name “Ebeneezer.”
After his years in Illinois, Fleet went west, working variously as a traveling salesman and as superintendent of a farm machinery factory in Council Bluffs, Iowa, before homesteading with his wife in Canada, Colorado, and Oregon. In Colorado, he helped plan and direct the building of an irrigation district and assisted other settlers by breaking prairie and harvesting first crops with steam-powered equipment. In Oregon he operated hardware, plumbing, and general-store businesses; took up land surveying; and for a time served as a United States land commissioner, handling homestead paperwork in a rapidly changing region. He also entered public service as a deputy and later sheriff in Lake County, Oregon, and he founded and purchased newspapers, including the Oregon Tribune and a paper in Sherwood, Oregon.
Helen (Richmond) Fleet died in 1934, and Fleet spent his final years increasingly focused on memories of his Hampton friends—feelings he expressed in his poem “Rubbing Shoulders,” written when he was in his eighties. He died at age 90 on June 2, 1948, at the Happy Haven Rest Home in Silvis, Illinois. Survivors included a son, Clarence Fleet of Portland, Oregon, and a daughter, Ethel (Fleet) McDonald of Seattle, Washington, as well as several grandchildren.