Chariton is situated on the divide between the watersheds for the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River to the west. The town was platted in 1849 as the location for the Lucas County Courthouse. The only interruptions to the grid were the block set aside for...
Clarinda, the seat of Page County, was established in the early 1850s in the valley of the West Nodaway River. In the center of the public square, defined by Main, Washington, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth streets, is the Page County Courthouse (1885–1887). The Des Moines firm...
Corning, the county seat of Adams County, was one of a chain of towns established along the East Nodaway River in the mid-1850s. Its growth was rapid during the years just before the Civil War; after the war the coming of the railroad brought a second period of intense...
Corydon, the seat of Wayne County, was founded in 1851. Within Dotts Park, off Iowa 2, is the Miles Log Cabin (1853). The logs of this cabin were first brought to Walden Park (c. 1927) where the building was restored by the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1969 the...
The town was established in 1869 as a division point by the Burlington and Missouri River Railway Company, and by the mid-1870s a roundhouse, machine shops, and railyards had been constructed. Eventually the county seat was transferred from Afton to Creston, and in 1890 a...
The community was platted on the northeast bank of the Des Moines River in 1839. By the late 1850s, Farmington had begun to emerge as a manufacturing center because of its location on the river and the existence of nearby coal deposits; later it was a railroad center....
Garden Grove was one of the early Mormon settlements in Iowa. In their journey west the Mormons settled the site in 1848 and remained until 1851. Andreas provides a picture of the location, remarking that “it is on a fine, rolling prairie, adjacent to a splendid grove...
The town of Keosauqua was platted in 1837 and 1839 by the Van Buren Company. The site selected lay on the north bank of the Des Moines River within a broad oxbow. In 1846 construction was started on the Des Moines River Improvement Project—a scheme using a series of dams...
In 1870 the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints purchased 3,330 acres of land in Decatur County, Iowa. At the end of that decade, in 1879, they platted the town of Lamoni, located on the main route of the Chicago and Burlington Railroad....
Situated in an open field at the corner of Van Buren Street East and Oak Street North in Lenox is a substantial two-story brick dwelling (c. 1870) which does not fit comfortably into any of the normal stylistic categories of the mid-nineteenth century. Essentially the house...
The county commission originally selected a site 4 miles west of Leon for the county seat, but in 1883 it was moved to Leon. This section of Decatur County was described as “high, gentle and rolling prairie, through which runs the main road from Fort Des Moines to Independence...
Five miles north of Keosauqua on Iowa 1 is the crossroads community of Mount Zion. At the north edge of the community, a half mile south of the junction of Iowa 1 and Iowa 16, is the Barker House (c. 1875). The vertical volumes of this two-story Italianate dwelling with...
As with a number of other Iowa communities, Osceola was founded as the county seat. The town was laid out in 1851, in the center of Clarke County, and situated in a high, rolling prairie. Though the Clarke County Courthouse (1884) is now gone (replaced by a modernist...
The city was laid out on the north bank of the lower Des Moines River in 1843 by the Appanoose Rapids and Milling Company. In the following year Ottumwa became the seat of Wapello County. Up through the 1870s the community was essentially confined to the low, hilly area...
The town was originally called Red Oak Junction, so named in anticipation of the community's being at the junction of north-south and east-west railroads (which eventually it was). The first buildings were erected on the site at the end of the 1850s, and it became the seat...
At the eastern side of the village of Selma, on the north side of Iowa 16, is the Hinkle log cabin, built by Thomas Benjamin Saylor in 1835 and then sold to Capt. Abraham Hinkle in 1868. As the cabin now stands one should refer to it as a log house, for it is a two-story...
The town was laid out in 1870 by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. The plan is unusual in that one of the principal streets, Clarinda Avenue, is at a 45-degree angle to the grid, and this avenue is attached to a segment of a circle, South Crescent Street. The...
The town of Stanton, which was settled by Swedes, turns out to be the birthplace of the actress Virginia Christine, who played “Mrs. Olson” in the television commercials for Folger's Coffee; thus the town's high water tower is in the form of a gigantic Swedish coffee pot (...
The community was established in 1857 on a site between the West and Middle forks of the Nodaway River. Like nearby Stanton and Red Oak, Villisca became a station stop on the east-west Burlington Northern Railroad line.
The Villisca National Bank (c. 1917) at the...
The northern section of the state was generally the last to be settled. The landscape of the area is essentially that of the classic, slightly undulating open prairie with very little in the way of groves of native trees. The trees and shrubs that do exist tend to reinforce the...
The small railroad town of Ackley, on the northern boundary of Hardin County, houses two dwellings influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. At 321 Hardin Street is a good-sized Craftsman bungalow built around 1915 for Dr. I. L. Potter. The dwelling and its extensive...
Algona, the seat of Kossuth County, was platted south of the east fork of the Des Moines River in 1856. This first plat provided for a public square (at State and Hall Streets), a courthouse, and a public park at Nebraska and Blackford streets. The delightful Kossuth County...
Within the small community of Allison, which is located almost in the center of Butler County, is the Richardsonian Romanesque Farmers Savings Bank (1902). The designer of this stylistically late building pulled a narrow arched entrance out from the building and brought...
At the southwest corner of Main and Upper streets is the building that housed the First State Bank (1915), now a retail store. While most of the warm-tan terracotta displays classical motifs, the design of this small building (almost domestic in size) is not classical in...
Lakes of any size are rare in Iowa; here, three of them—Spirit Lake, West Okoboji Lake, and East Okoboji Lake—adjoin one another. Arnold's Park offers all that one would expect in a resort town: an amusement park (with a great roller coaster), park, restaurants,...
The auditorium and gymnasium (1941–1942) building, located at the corner of Fifth Avenue Northeast and Fourth Street Northeast, beautifully illustrates how abstract the PWA Moderne could be at the end of the 1930s. The two flanking walls of this building, which was...
This community in central Hancock County was traversed by two railroads, so quite early it acquired two adjacent groups of tall concrete grain elevators that are visible some distance from the town. Within town is the Lewis Larson house (1896), now operated as the Hancock...
In the center of the small town of Castalia, on the south side of US 52, is the former Castalia Savings Bank building (c. 1892). This tiny building, now used as the post office, is one of the gems of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture in Iowa. Its facade—just 20 feet...
As with so many communities in Iowa, the site for Cedar Falls was selected because of the potential of water power, in this instance the dramatic 14-foot-high falls of the Cedar River. An initial platting of the site took place in 1851, but the north-south, east-west...
