Mount Union borough, Tell township

From the Beers Hotel to Congress

Edward McMath Beers was born near Nossville in 1877, and his family moved to Mount Union in 1889. In April 1890 his father, Anderson Beers, moved to the Seibert House, a hotel at the corner of Jefferson and Shirley Streets. Anderson died on April 9, 1894, and Edward and his mother, Mary, ran the hotel after him.

The 1909 history of Mount Union called him the present mayor of Mount Union and the proprietor of the Beers Hotel. The Biographical Directory of the American Congress gives his years as mayor as 1910 to 1914. He served as an associate judge of Huntingdon County from 1914 to 1923.

Voters elected him to the 68th Congress as a Republican on November 7, 1922, and returned him to the four Congresses that followed. He represented Pennsylvania's Eighteenth District, which in 1930 included Huntingdon County and seven other counties. His service began on March 4, 1923.

The Congressional Directory of December 1930 lists him as chairman of the House Committee on Printing and as a member of the committees on the District of Columbia, Invalid Pensions and War Claims. The notice of his death posted at the Government Printing Office said he chaired the Printing committee for six years and served as vice chairman of the Joint Committee on Printing during the Seventy-first Congress. It called him "a true friend of the Government Printing Office."

He died of influenza at the Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 1932. Both houses of Congress adjourned that afternoon after passing resolutions of regret and respect. He was buried in the Odd Fellows' Cemetery at Mount Union.

His brother, Dr. Harry Lynn Beers, was the fourth son of Anderson and Mary Beers. Harry began teaching in 1891 at the Sheridan school in Trough Creek and was for one year principal of the Mount Union schools. After a year at Dickinson College he spent five years as principal of the schools at Osceola, in Clearfield County, where he helped raise the money for a town library of nearly one thousand volumes. On June 27, 1900, he married Effie E. Miller of Newton Hamilton.

Harry entered the medical department of the University of Michigan in 1905 and graduated in the spring of 1909. He practiced in Youngstown, Ohio, and died there on December 5, 1933.

Checked against the record. We checked both brothers against the Biographical Directory of the American Congress, the Official Congressional Directory of December 1930, the Public Printer's report for 1932, two Washington newspapers of April 22, 1932, the 1909 history of Mount Union, the 1897 Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of the Juniata Valley, a 1900 marriage list, a university catalogue, the Journal of the American Medical Association and a county medical society bulletin. The 1909 history and the 1897 book both name Edward and Harry as sons of Anderson and Mary Beers. The sources disagree on some details. The birth dates for Edward differ between the books, so the story gives the year. The Directory dates his taking over of the hotel to 1895, while the 1897 book has him managing it after his father's death in 1894. The 1909 history gives both 1889 and April 1890 for the Seibert House. It also calls him the present mayor, while the Directory starts his years as mayor in 1910. The vice chairmanship of the Joint Committee on Printing rests on the Government Printing Office notice, so we cannot say when in the Seventy-first Congress he held it. We have not found a Huntingdon County newspaper's account of either death.

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