Iowa Stories

Dexter’s first public library–with 100 donated books–opened in 1930 in Allen Percy’s law office. 

After 1934 the library was moved from Mr. Percy’s office to a room at the town hall. Two years later it became tax supported and reorganized under Iowa library laws. 

Edwin Hurd Conger  (1843-1907) 

Iowa State Treasurer, State Representative to US Congress, Ambassador to Brazil and China 

As noted in the July/August 2017 issue of Iowa History Journal, Terry Branstad is not the first Iowan to be named as US Ambassador to China. The first was a man from Dexter, Iowa named Edwin H. Conger.   

August 26th of 2020 will mark the centennial of the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment officially giving women the right to vote.  The 2020 centennial slogan is Hard Won, Not Done. 

Research on Eleanor Chafin Stockman by Joanne Hardinger, Pat Schultz, and Colleen Last. 

Eunice Viola “Ola” Babcock Miller was the first female Secretary of State in Iowa. During her time in office she laid the foundation for the State Highway Patrol. She learned the art of political influence from her husband and the events happening around her. Ola Babcock Miller is important in Iowa history because of her role in forming the Iowa State Highway Patrol and being one of the first women in Iowa politics.  

Iowans at the turn of the 20th C.

It was a tragic series of events that swept Iowa into a conflict that began in Europe when a Bosnia Serb fired the shot that killed Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The major European powers squared off with Germany and Austria on one side facing Great Britain, France, and Russia on the other.  By the time an armistice was signed four bloody years later, an estimated 2,000 Iowa soldiers and sailors had been killed and another 2,000 had been injured or were missing in action.

Wild celebrations broke out on November 18, 1918 as news of the Armistice reached Iowa cities and small towns. Bonfires on city squares lit up the night sky as revelry continued well into the early morning hours.  The formal speeches came the next day as the orators tried to put the meaning of the fighting into context and to extend hope for America’s future. That future, however, was not the “return to normalcy” that Presidential candidate Warren G.

Courtesy of the Iowa History Journal Jan/Feb 2023.

Famous botanist, innovator was educated in Iowa and was ISU’s first black student, faculty member

George Washington Carver, a brilliant, ambitious son of a slave, who had to navigate through life in a white man’s world, emerged to be one of the greatest agricultural scientists of his time, admired and respected by people all over the world.

Grenville Dodge (1831-1916) became a resident of Council Bluffs in 1855. He worked to establish the Rock Island Railroad route from Davenport to Council Bluffs, Iowa.  He served during the Civil War, initially building and protecting railroad systems.  He was promoted to Major General, resigning in 1866 to become chief engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad.  Dodge led the Union Pacific to successfully meet the Central Pacific and complete the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1859.

Helen Bamford  (November 16, 1902 – November 3, 1994)
Contributed by: Muscatine Women of Influence and Inspiration

Many residents of Muscatine and outlying areas will remember Helen Bamford. She owned her own photography studio in Muscatine for several years, specializing in portraits, and was the photographer for many high school yearbook pictures, weddings, children, and family portraits.

History of Alden, Iowa Football 1928-2002

Inkpaduta (Scarlet Point) (ca. 1805–ca. 1879) 

Construction on the three-story Iowa Capitol building in Des Moines, Iowa began in 1870 and lasted until 1886. By 1904 the Capitol building was due for a restoration. The Capitol Improvement Commission was put in charge of the process. They were to install artwork, replace windows, install a new copper roof, re-guild the dome, and change the gas lighting to electricity. These restorations were commissioned in hope of improving the aesthetic of the building. Another reason was to update the outdated gas lighting system with a more modern system. An electrician by the name of H.

The Red Cross served a vital function during the First World War, both overseas and at home.  It was the primary way for American women to serve their country during the conflict.  Hundreds of thousands of Iowa women supported the war effort by completing millions of hours of volunteer work for the organization.  Iowa had only nine Red Cross chapters in early 1917, but its volunteer ranks swelled quickly after the war began in April.  The organization had more than one million members and 164 chapters in the state by the time the war ended.  A vast amount of labor w

The link below will take you to a series of 27 letters from John and Sarah Kenyon to family members in Iowa.  Their letters are an excellent first-hand account of life in frontier Iowa.  The Kenyons lived in Delaware County in eastern Iowa. The letters have a handy topic list on the right-hand side, so you can easily find material in the letters on 'migration', 'land sales,' 'snakes,' 'prairie fires,' 'weather,' 'health,' etc.  These letters provide a great introduction to daily life in mid-19th Century Iowa.  (UNI Iowa History project online.) 

John Vincent Atanasoff (October 4, 1903–June 15, 1995) 

Kitturah Belknap and her husband George moved to Iowa in the 1830s and labored to save money to buy their land.  This is a good review of the role of women in early Iowa.  This is highly readable and will help you understand what life was like on the Iowa frontier.  Link:  https://ir.uiowa.edu/annals-of-iowa/vol44/iss1/8/  (Annals of Iowa, #44, 1977.  It is also in Glenda Riley’s wonderful collection of memoirs and autobiographies from 19th Century Iowa women called Prairie Voices.)

Mary Jane (Whitely) Coggeshall was born in 1836 in Indiana into a Quaker family and became the first Iowan to achieve national prominence in the promotion of women’s suffrage.  She married John Coggeshall in 1857 and had three children, two of whom survived into adulthood.  The couple moved to Des Moines in 1865 at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Iowa’s first female Master Farmer, May Hoopes was also the first woman to receive an honorary degree in agriculture from what would eventually become Iowa State University. She was an astute businesswoman who helped her husband go into truck farming and the seed business on a large scale. When a depression hit in 1893 and money was short, May suggested that they use their own asparagus seed for planting; they dried it in their attic, eventually selling it and helping develop the largest wholesale seed company in Iowa.

Mira Hershey (1843 - 1930)

Muscatine first became rich due to lumber.  Benjamin Hershey was one of the original lumber barons. He further built his fortune by acquiring a saw mill and his own bank.  Benjamin was the father of four daughters, of whom one,  Almira, called Mira, inherited both his money and his business acumen. Mira's philanthropy helped Muscatine grow and develop.

120 Years Ago – August 14, 1900

Musician Calvin P. Titus Scales the Tartar Wall during the Boxer Rebellion

During the late 1890s resistance to foreign imperial incursions in Northern China was advocated by a secret society called the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists.”  Westerners referred to them as “Boxers” due to their practice of martial arts.

World-Famous Surgeon, Dr. Nelson M. Percy (1875-1958)
Developer of the Percy System of Whole Blood Transfusion

Nelson Mortimer Percy was born in Dexter, Iowa, in 1875 to Mortimer and Mary (Amidon) Percy.  Founded in 1868, Dexter is a small town in central Iowa, in the southwest corner of Dallas County.  Nelson attended Dexter public schools, graduating in 1892.

The Amish were some of the first white settlers in Washington and Johnson Counties in the 1840s.  They were a highly religious and distinctive community, characterized by “belief in superiority of agrarian life and desire to be isolated from influences outside their own group,” wrote historians Elmer Schwieder and Dorothy Schwieder. 

Opal Tanner (1902-1977)

Ora Pearl Mc Gill (1894-1924)

Ora Pearl Mc Gill came to Muscatine, Iowa, as a young woman of fifteen to work in a button factory. By her death in 1924, Pearl had traversed the United States speaking out for the rights of workers in early factories, met Helen Keller, who supported Pearl's continuing her education, gotten her teaching license, taught school, and became the principal of the Buffalo, Iowa, school.

There she met her fate, murdered by her ex-husband or someone who just wanted her rubbed out.