An 1867 Supreme Court ruling designated Waukon as the seat of Allamakee County, officially ending a fifteen year county seat controversy. In 1851, voters selected now-deserted Columbus as the county seat; two years later, voters changed course and designated Waukon as the seat, and confirmed this decision in a 1859 vote. While a new courthouse was constructed in Waukon in 1861, residents voted to assign county seat status to Lansing the following year. In 1864, the county sheriff and his Waukon-based posse attempted to steal the county records, but the effort was intercepted and the records were returned.
Following the Supreme Court decision, the 1861 building served as the county courthouse until 1940, when a new, larger facility was constructed. The historic building now serves as the Allamakee County Historical Museum, which has a number of local artifacts. The original second-floor courtroom is intact and open to the public during museum hours.
Construction began on the new Algona Post Office on May 28, 1964 with an expected completion date of October 31, 1964. The construction project was postponed three times due to heavy rains in the spring and summer, heavy snow in the winter, and heavy thawing and flooding the following spring. Once work was completed, the process of moving equipment and mail from the old post office to the new one began 4:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 2, 1965. The Post Office opened to the public the following day and was formally dedicated September 11, 1965.
The historic Church of the Brethren in the Butler County community of Greene was organized in a rural schoolhouse building in June of 1857. Funds were raised to purchase a lot for its present site in 1873, when the land was cleared and the native stone church was erected. The church, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, has changed little over the years and is the oldest active church building in the Greene community.
A yoked parish agreement was established with the Greene United Methodist Church in 1970, an arrangement that continues today. The churches share a single pastor, and services alternate between the Methodist Church and pictured Church of the Brethren.
The first library in the Davis County seat of Bloomfield was organized in the 1870s in a second-story room within the Exchange Bank building on the northeast corner of the town square. Sixteen charter members of the library group paid five dollars for borrowing privileges, and a committee was established to grow the library’s collection. A grant from Andrew Carnegie was secured in November 1911, and shortly after, Bloomfield’s mayor appointed a Library board to oversee the building process. A site was selected and Des Moines-based Wetherell & Gage designed the $10,000 facility. The pressed brick and limestone building was dedicated in August 1913 and still serves as the library today.
These welcome signs are located along State Highway 3 on the edge of the community of Meriden in Cherokee County. Now home to 184 residents, the community’s origins can be traced to December 1869 when railroad construction from Sioux City stopped there for the winter. A small grocery store business grew into a town, originally called Hazard, one of several area communities named for early settler John Blair. According to the WPA Guide to 1930s Iowa, “townspeople had no love for Mr. Blair” and the town was renamed Meriden in 1878. No evidence remains as to why the Meriden name was chosen.
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