5 files on the desk from Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
Mount Pleasant farmer and town supervisor (1870, 1872); Wisconsin Senate special election 1873; Racine businessman; died Nov. 14, 1886
$350
Charles Herrick was Mount Pleasant’s nineteenth-century business-civic name—a Massachusetts transplant who farmed the town for nearly three decades, sat on its board, and briefly held a Wisconsin Senate seat before dying a Racine banker. He is what the village actually had before Case High started minting athletes, not a modern founder myth.
He left Westford, Massachusetts, in 1836, logged the Muskegon and White Rivers, and in 1841 set up in Racine selling produce and cattle. He married Ann Ball of Virgil, New York, on December 14, 1846; they had three sons. From 1849 to 1854 he manufactured fanning mills—the machine that cleaned grain so a wheat county could sell it—and served as village trustee, city alderman, original school-board member, and director of the new Racine Gas-light and Coke Company. In 1857 he moved to the neighboring Town of Mount Pleasant and farmed. He sat on the Mount Pleasant board in 1870 and 1872. In 1873 he won a Senate special election as a Liberal Republican, 2,423 to 1,519 over Philo Belden, then lost the seat back to Robert Hall Baker a year later (Baker 2,706, Herrick 2,130 on the short-lived Liberal Reform ticket). The Madison stretch was one Senate session, not a long legislative career.
He died of heart failure in a Racine house on November 14, 1886, vice-president of Union National Bank; the Bankers’ Magazine ran the obituary. He is buried at Mound Cemetery in the city of Racine, not Mount Pleasant. The place claim is the 1857–1886 farm-and-board stretch in Mount Pleasant, with Racine as the earlier business base and the place of death.
Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
Mount Pleasant dairy-farm raise and Case High alum; MLB infielder and Giants broadcaster (Kruk and Kuip)
$67,500
Before he was half of Kruk and Kuip, Duane Kuiper was a dairy kid whose father painted a strike zone on the barn wall. Born in Racine on June 19, 1950, he was raised on the 100-acre Mount Pleasant farm Henry and Annette Kuiper bought in 1952 for $35,000, just east of Interstate 94 on Highway 20. Henry, an accomplished softball pitcher, threw tennis balls until the chores were done. Jerome I. Case High School played a fifteen-game baseball schedule. The Yankees drafted him out of that gym. He turned them down, then the Pilots, White Sox, Reds, and Red Sox through junior college and a Southern Illinois team that lost the 1971 College World Series final. Cleveland offered $8,000, half of New York's number. His father said take it, or word might get around that he did not want to play.
Twelve major-league seasons produced a .271 average and one home run in 3,379 at-bats: a Steve Stone slider on August 29, 1977, two rows into the right-field seats on Monday Night Baseball, beamed back to Racine. Teammates ran to the plate to meet him; his line was "Me and Sadaharu Oh." He hit two bases-loaded triples in one game at Yankee Stadium and caught two balls that helped Len Barker's 1981 perfect game. Gaylord Perry, going for twenty wins, told the kid on his first start that an error meant he would never play behind him again. Traded to the Giants for Ed Whitson, he later became Mike Krukow's broadcast partner in San Francisco.
The Mount Pleasant farm sold in 2018 for an Advocate Aurora hospital. Kuiper walked the ruins and said a warehouse would have been fine; a hospital made his dad feel great. Younger brother Glen broadcasts for the Athletics. Birth was in Racine; the raising, and the hometown story, is the dairy farm in Mount Pleasant.
Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
Jerome I. Case High (Mount Pleasant) soccer star; MLS player and coach; Canada men’s national-team manager from 2024
$174,375
Jesse Alan Marsch is the Racine-area soccer product who went from Jerome I. Case High School in Mount Pleasant to Princeton, Major League Soccer, and top European benches. Born November 8, 1973, he grew up watching his father, Larry, work the third shift making tractor parts and decided early that the factory was not the plan. He played for Dynamo and Racine Soccer Club, joined the U.S. under-18 team at sixteen, and earned all-state honors in 1990 and 1991 plus county player of the year. Case High, in the western suburbs of Racine, was the gym. Princeton took him because soccer got him in the door—he has said he would not have made it on grades alone—and he scored sixteen goals, earning All-America recognition in 1995.
Bob Bradley drafted him to D.C. United and later brought him to the expansion Chicago Fire. Marsch won three MLS Cups in three seasons, multiple U.S. Open Cups, and earned two caps for the United States; he was an MLS All-Star in 2001. Coaching followed at New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Salzburg, RB Leipzig, Leeds United, and, in 2024, the Canada men’s national team. He learned German at forty-four. He told The Athletic that to grow up as he did, where he did, and to reach the Premier League felt almost impossible.
Papers uniformly call him a Racine native, and the industrial city in that interview is Racine. The high school that produced him sits in Mount Pleasant, which is the place tie for this page. The Racine County Sports Hall of Fame inducted him in 2014 and calls him the finest soccer player the county has produced.
Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
Marathoner who won New York and Boston in the mid-1970s; born Racine; Jerome I. Case High (Mount Pleasant) and UW–Parkside
$200,000
Kim Merritt was a mid-1970s American marathon star who won New York and Boston before the Olympics even fielded a women’s race. Born in Racine on May 22, 1955, she ran for Jerome I. Case High School in Mount Pleasant (class of 1973, then Kim Piper-Merritt) and for the University of Wisconsin–Parkside. As a freshman she took the state cross-country title and finished fifth at the nationals; AIAW honors in track and cross country, plus Academic All-America recognition, followed at Parkside, which inducted her into its hall of fame in the first class of 1980.
In September 1975, at twenty, she debuted at the New York City Marathon and beat Michiko Gorman in 2:46:15. The next April she won the Boston Marathon in 2:47:10 and left the course under police escort for blisters, not a collapse. Honolulu that December produced 2:44:44 and the year’s fastest American women’s mark. At the 1977 Nike Oregon Track Club Marathon she ran 2:37:57, an American record and the fourth-fastest time in the world that year. She won the inaugural Bix 7 and retained that title and the Charleston Distance Run in 1976. When the Games finally opened a women’s marathon, she finished fifty-third at the 1984 Olympic trials in 2:43:31.
Racine County later put her in its sports hall of fame. The Case campus that produced her sits in Mount Pleasant; the birth certificate and the county fame are Racine. Her peak was the twelve months when a Parkside kid from the Case attendance area could still win New York and Boston in the same season.
Profile · Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
U.S. Olympic volleyball player (Atlanta 1996); Case High School star in Mount Pleasant / Racine; Pepperdine All-American
$500,000
Tom Sorensen is the Case High School volleyball star who became a U.S. national-team mainstay and the starting right side for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Born in Racine on April 6, 1971, the 6-foot-6 outside hitter graduated from Jerome I. Case High School in 1989 after two Racine County player-of-the-year awards, two Wisconsin volleyball MVP trophies, and a state championship. Mount Pleasant is where that gym sits; every national bio still lists hometown Racine.
Pepperdine and coach Marv Dunphy—the 1988 Olympic coach—recruited him. He left Malibu with 2,207 career kills, still second in program history, and once put up 53 in a single night against UCLA. He was NCAA Freshman of the Year in 1990 and an All-American from 1991 through 1993, leading the Waves in kills and aces all four seasons. Championship point of the 1992 NCAA final was his service ace after 33 kills in a three-set sweep of Stanford; across the two tournament matches he totaled 57 kills.
The national team kept him from 1991 through 2000. He wore No. 6 as Atlanta’s starting right side, won World Championship bronze in Greece in 1994 and Pan American silver in 1995, and was named U.S. Olympic Committee Volleyball Player of the Year in 1997. He played professionally in Italy and Spain and some AVP, was an alternate for the 2000 Games, entered the Racine County Sports Hall of Fame in 2011 and Pepperdine’s in 2015, and came home for clinics. The Case building is the Mount Pleasant tie.