"He thanked me, and, oh, he was a fine gentleman,” Mary Wiseman Hindman recalled in 1930 when a Wisconsin newspaper reporter interviewed her. Mary was talking about Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee.
An 8-year-old girl was on the Dubuque Street dock in Iowa City and using a pole to test the depth of the water when she lost her balance. What happened next was deemed to be heroic.
“People don’t like to take orders from a kid,” La Blanche Farmer told a newspaper reporter in 1925 when asked about her experiences managing a canning factory. La Blanche was talking about her first position in her dad’s canning business.
In some ways John W. Griggs was a typical Iowa farmer. But in 1909 a New York City newspaper described Griggs’ Iowa operation as the “only deer farm run for profit.”
A group of soldiers gathered at an artillery field on the grounds of Fort Monroe, Virginia, on Monday, Feb. 7, 1870. The U.S. government had authorized the Army to carry out the testing of a new product designed by an Iowa man.
“A lot of fellows tried to drive the bull into the wires with him on it,” J.H. Harrington described an incident that had occurred at the Delaware County fair at Delhi in 1859. When a “somewhat intoxicated” fair goer hopped on a bull’s back and rode around a track enclosed by a strange looking fence,
It was about 1:30 in the morning on October 28, 1902, when Prairie City dentist, Dr. S. B. Gidford, woke up in his room across the street from the bank. As he stuck his head out a window, a “loaded 44-caliber Colt” was “presented to his face” by a stranger who told him his life was “worth less than
“Aside from the overt criminal acts described and a too liberal use of profanity, my life has been approximately pure and correct,” Polk Wells said from his prison cell at Anamosa, Iowa. And he swore he never used liquor or tobacco.
Experts said Hope Glenn had a rarely beautiful contralto voice, a winsome face and a graceful physical presence, helping this Iowan become a celebrity in 19th century opera houses in America and Europe.
When Nixon “Nick” Denton died in January 1878, his friends in Manchester, Iowa, reminded people of a story Nick liked to tell about an encounter he had with a man
In an era of “entirely too much reckless driving,” Ripley's "Believe it or Not" cited Eva Jordan for achieving an “enviable record of safety,” having driven a million miles—with no accidents. That's only part of her story, though.
