The Great Sioux City Mansion Scam: Iowa Time Machine December 24, 1900

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On December 24, 1900, a crowd gathered at Sioux City's Union depot to witness what newspapers called the raffle of the century. The prize was magnificent: a 21-room Sioux City mansion valued at $75,000 ($2,892,642.86 in 2025), built from South Dakota quartzite with polished pillars and carved hardwoods.

A tinner from a local business brought a pair of tin shears and cut open a sealed tin box from Security National Bank containing approximately 40,000 raffle tickets, each sold for one dollar. When officials drew the winning ticket belonging to Bert M. Bills, a jeweler from Vinton, Iowa, the crowd cheered for the lucky winner. Within weeks, the celebration would sour into a scandal as Iowans discovered they had been victims of one of the state's most brazen confidence schemes. This Christmas gift turned into a cautionary tale about Gilded Age greed.

John Peirce embodied the type of booster who built western cities through equal parts vision and speculation. Born in Pennsylvania in 1839, Peirce arrived in Sioux City during the 1870s and immediately threw himself into real estate development, particularly promoting the city's Northside. He helped construct five corn palaces between 1887 and 1891, served multiple terms on the city council, and invested heavily in businesses from flour mills to streetcar lines. Sioux City was considered the next great metropolis of the West until the international recession of 1893 hit the city, when several prominent businesspeople declared bankruptcy. Peirce joined those ranks, watching his fortune evaporate as banks failed and property values collapsed. By 1900, facing mortgage payments he could not meet and a city whose boom years seemed permanently finished, Peirce conceived a desperate plan. Newspapers across the country carried advertisements for the drawing, and tickets were sold in Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and states as far away as New York. Peirce claimed he wanted to pay off the mortgage with cash to spare, positioning the raffle as a creative solution to his woes.

Days after the raffle, newspapers reported that William Barbour, a millionaire New York thread maker, held the deed to the property. The abstract for Peirce's mansion actually reveals that a warranty deed transferring title to William Barbour was drawn up on December 17, 1900, a full week before the drawing took place. The revelation stunned ticket buyers: the entire raffle had been fraudulent from the start, with Pierce using the scheme to settle debts he owed to Barbour while pocketing proceeds from forty thousand one-dollar tickets. Peirce left for Seattle soon after the scandal broke, and Barbour, the actual deed holder, quickly sold the mansion to settle his own debts. Today, the Peirce Mansion itself stands as a physical monument to this cautionary tale, now operated by the Sioux City Public Museum and available for tours and special events. #Iowa #History #OTD #Scam #Raffle