Iowa Stories

Peter Melendy (February 9, 1823–October 18, 1901) 

The two decades following Iowa’s admission to the Union in 1846 as the 29th state may have been the most formative period in Iowa’s history.  New settlers from eastern states and Europe surged across the fertile prairies and created an agricultural powerhouse.  These new arrivals also brought their religious convictions and desire to provide education for their children.

European and American settlers faced many challenges in Iowa, from blizzards and disease to drought and death by accident.  One thing that scared everyone was fire. Prairie fires terrorized Iowans.  Neither roads nor creeks could prevent their advance in dry weather, wrote Sarah Brewer-Bonebright in Reminiscences of Newcastle Iowa.  No one could outrun them either.  Such fires could destroy everything a family had worked for in minutes, consuming crops and housing. 

Some slaves lived in territorial Iowa, though slavery was not widespread.  In 1834, Ralph, the slave of his Missouri owner Jordan Montgomery, came to work in the Dubuque mines.  Ralph had agreed to labor in Dubuque to earn $550, plus interest, to buy his freedom.  He labored for five years, but was unable to pay the debt.  Living costs were simply too high to save much money. 

In a democracy, the voters are to select their legislators, but up until recent years, the legislators drew the maps into the districts from which they were elected.

Reprinted with permission of Iowa History Journal

“Airplanes fall up not down is the opinion of American Graves Registration Service and Recovery personnel now operating in the New Guinea area.  Teams of volunteer personnel are based at Fineshhafen, New Guinea where the temporary National Cemetery for the Southwest Pacific is located.  This work is the attempt to investigate all isolated air crashes and infantry burials where there is sufficient leads to warrant a search.” wrote Sergeant Robert T. “Smitty” Smith.

NOTE: This article by Tom Morain is his adaptation of an essay he wrote in 2000, that appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000 Issue of Iowa Heritage Illustrated in an issue devoted to the opening of an exhibit at the State Historical Society of Iowa, where he was then Director, called “A Few of My Favorite Things” that displayed significant and ordinary inventions that changed daily life for Iowa families.

With Permission of Iowa History Journal

Sam Hall, 47 Years A Slave: A Brief Story of His Life Before and After Freedom Came to Him.  Washington, Iowa: Journal Print, 1912.  Posted at Documenting the American South.  https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/hall/summary.html.

Samuel Kirkwood served as Iowa governor for most of the Civil War, from January 1860 until January 1864.Kirkwood had been born in Maryland and studied law in Ohio. Before coming to Iowa in 1855, he was an attorney in Mansfield, Ohio, and a prosecuting attorney for Richland County, Ohio. He took part in the founding of the Republican Party in Iowa, deserting the Democrats to join the new antislavery party.

Civil War relief worker, Methodist activist, temperance reformer, editor, hymn writer, and author—was born near Sandy Springs, Adams County, Ohio, the oldest child of John G. and Elizabeth (Smith) Turner. Her parents sent her to a local female seminary, where, at an early age, she demonstrated considerable talent. In 1847...

Please see:  Martin, Robert F. "Wittenmyer, Sarah Ann “Annie” Turner" The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. University of Iowa Press, 2009. Web. 2 December 2019
 

The 1900 census shows twenty-nine Mexican immigrants living in Iowa, none in Muscatine. The 1910 census lists six single men in Muscatine, plus—apparently—the first and only family household: John and Anna Sanchez and their three children. Anna and her thirteen-year-old daughter were the only Mexican females listed in the entire city in 1910.

Iowa entered the Union as the 29th state during the most divisive period in United States history.  When the political system could no longer resolve the issues, it took four years of war and the deaths of 650,000 Americans to preserve the Union and end the practice of slavery.  The war, however, by no means solved issues of race that have plagued the nation from its earliest days.

The world focused on a farm outside Coon Rapids, Iowa, on September 23, 1959.  Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union and its Community Party, was visiting the farm of hybrid corn salesman Roswell Garst to learn more about American agriculture production.  It was a period of heightened tension between the U.S. and Soviet Union with fears of nuclear war always in the background.  The “Iron Curtain” across Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall restricted Western access to Soviet-dominated countries.

In the mid-1850s, families of white settlers pushed far beyond the frontier line of settlement in northwest Iowa onto the shores of Spirit Lake.  Although by formal treaty the Wahpekute Sioux (Dakota) tribe had given up title to the land, small bands separated from the main tribe still lived in the region.  They were not under the authority of tribal leaders. 

Susan Clark (1854-1925)

Who was Susan Clark? When the Muscatine school board renamed the combined middle schools for her in 2019, many residents said they had never heard of her.

“Miss Stone was a leader of the women of her generation. She was one of the first women in Iowa to take over the promotion of community betterment projects.” This tribute to Susan Fitch Stone, appearing in the Muscatine Journal following her death in 1930, describes a woman of action, one dedicated to the greater good of her community.

On May 19, 1898, twenty-five days after the U.S. declaration of war against Spain, the Spanish fleet, under the command of Admiral Pascual Cervera, arrived in Santiago Harbor, Cuba.  The entrance of the harbor was blockaded nine days later by the United States Navy’s Atlantic Squadron permitting the unopposed landings of U.S. Army troops on June 22-23.  Among the ships of the Atlantic Squadron poised outside the harbor entrance was the USS Iowa, the U. S. Navy’s first seagoing battleship.

J. Sarah Braunwarth  (1853-1927)
Emma Braunwarth (1859-1940)

The Great Depression of the 1930s devastated Iowa families.  Americans suffered from its negative effects for years.  Millions lost their jobs and incomes fell across the nation.  The depression was an economic calamity.  In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was elected President of the United States—he promised a “new deal” of government programs that would fight the crisis.  A variety of New Deal programs attempted to reduce unemployment.  One of them was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).  It provided government jobs to 500,000 young men nationwide in its fir

Rosa Schreurs Jennings, The Country Teacher.  The Annals of Iowa, Vol. 31, Number 1 (Summer 1951), pps. 41-62. 

This is a memoir of rural schools in Iowa in the 1890s.  It is a great survey of what education was like in the late nineteenth century, when teachers boarded with local families and tried to teach elementary school to twenty or thirty kids at many different grade levels.   

https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7222&context=annals-of-iowa

Iowans suffered terribly during the Great Depression.

Iowa recruited a regiment of men over the age of 45 called the “graybeards,” officially known as the 37th Iowa Infantry Regiment.  They served from October 1862 until May 1865.  The average age was 57, with more than 100 of the men in their sixties.  It was a unique unit, with no other like it in the Union army.  The Secretary of War gave permission for their enlistment, requiring that they serve only in guard and garrison duty.  Many of these men were veterans of the Mexican War or other conflicts, but were too old for the rigors of combat and long marches.  A

Imperfect surveying led to the famed “Honey War” with Missouri in 1839.  This was a bloodless and sometimes humorous quarrel over the southern border of Iowa.  The dispute arose out of a careless surveyor who left an uncertain border between the two states.  A surveyor appointed by Missouri decided that the boundary between the states was too far south.  He set a new one farther north.

The Ku Klux Klan was a secret organization that promoted white nationalism in the name of patriotism and Christianity.  Originally organized in the South after the Civil War to deny economic and political advancements to former slaves, its members intimidated, terrorized and often carried out physical attacks on black families.