Survivors described the cries and shrieks of dying passengers as “heart-rending.” And one recalled the last voice he heard was that of a “little child in a cabin.”
Railroad man S.G. Durant once said the conveniences at a Georgia prison “outdo services at many good hotels” in the country. He knew that first-hand. He had been a prisoner there. His story:
Farmers in the Charles City area threatened to take their business to neighboring towns if the Improvement Association removed the hitching posts in the city park. But the 45 women
It was rumored that a wagon and team of oxen had disappeared from sight as its driver attempted to cross Purgatory Slough. They were never seen again.
And the Marshalltown
The Secret Service said it was his “unusually inquisitive” nature about military matters that tipped off personnel about a German man working as a waiter in the officers’ mess at
As the coach rounded the bridge at Walnut Creek, nine miles west of Centerville, the passenger on the driver’s box pulled out a revolver and jabbed it into the left breast of drive F.J. Leach. Here's the rest of the story.
Civic leaders in Iowa in 1869 were proud of their state. It offered some of the most fertile soils and flourishing towns and cities. Railroads snaked across the landscape north and south and east and west. It was believed there were inexhaustible amounts of coal beneath the earth’s surface in Iowa.
Some considered silos indispensable to profitable livestock raising and dairying. Not only were they practical, the structures were considered an ornament to any farm. The conical silo roof, with its curved walls was said to add a very pleasing enhancement to any farmstead.
Early one January morning in 1887 a farmer from Tabor, Iowa, hitched his team of horses to a sled and headed out to get some wood about four miles from home. By the time he returned at the end of a long day, one of his horses was suffering from a serious case of colic.
“Everybody came from somewhere, as nobody was born and raised here,” John F. Fish said in 1914 when the elderly Wapello County pioneer sat down to visit with a local newspaper reporter. John was reminiscing about Iowa in the 1830s—before statehood.
“I would rather be a chambermaid in a livery stable than a doorkeeper in a church,” Julia Maria Teeple of Baldwin, Iowa, explained when asked about her unusual profession as a livery manager in 1894.
