Picture this house as a society showplace of the grandest scale when architect William Foster completed it for Hoyt Sherman in 1877. This house was completed in 1877 with the help of Iowa architect William Foster and was noted almost immediately as "a society showplace of the grandest scale. Hoyt Sherman purchased five acres here in 1850 for $105 after moving to Fort Des Moines in 1848 at the age of 21, when the town was still a frontier outpost.
A lawyer by training, Sherman was appointed the city's postmaster by President Zachary Taylor, and during the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln named him an Army Paymaster with the rank of major. He helped form the Equitable of Iowa Insurance Company and shaped the Des Moines school system and waterworks. In this house he and his wife Sara raised five children—Frank, Addie, Charles, Arthur, and Helen—and welcomed distinguished guests like General William Tecumseh Sherman, General Ulysses S. Grant, General Philip Sheridan, and Major William McKinley.
Major Hoyt Sherman died in January 1904. Picture General Sherman and General Grant once passing through this door of the 1877 showplace, here on these Des Moines streets.