American Legion Post No. 83 was founded in the Keokuk County town of Hedrick on June 30, 1919 with 15 charter members. A Woman’s Auxiliary Unit was established two years later. The current Legion building was constructed in 1957, almost entirely using volunteer labor. The Legion and Auxiliary are involved in many community events, but are perhaps best-known for their homemade ice cream, served from the Legion building during Hedrick’s annual Barbecue Days event.
Postal service came to Sabula, Iowa’s only island town, in July 1837 under the moniker Carl Port. The post office station was quickly renamed to Charleston before a final change to Sabula in February 1846. The town’s first postmaster was William H. Brown, with mail delivery three times each week from the route between Dubuque and Davenport. The post office occupied a half-dozen different locations before moving to its present site in 1996.
The unincorporated town of Troy has the distinction of being the site of the first Methodist church in Davis County in southeast Iowa. It was organized in 1846, with the first building constructed in 1852. On September 8, 1923, the first load of sand was hauled to Troy for use in construction of a new church. An all-day farewell service was held and the first church building was torn down the following week. The $9,000 building was dedicated on June 15, 1924. The church shares a pastor with the Methodist church in the nearby town of Cantril.
Plans for a library in the Hardin County town of Steamboat Rock were made in 1958 when members of the community progress club collected books and funds. The first library opened the following year within a room in the town hall, where it remained until for three years. At that time, the old telephone company building was donated for use as a library, with an open house held on June 25, 1962.
Upgrades were made to the interior in 1968, while in 1974, the front of the building was renovated with the addition of brick facing and a front porch for a cost of $5,000. The building continues to serve as the library today; it’s open six days each week.
The Decatur County town of Grand River made national headlines in 1980 for being the next-to-last town in the United States to exchange their crank telephones in favor of “new-fangled dial sets or push-button models.” The switch was officially made on Saturday, December 6, 1980, more than 20 months after residents voted 121-73 to replace their phone system, which was operated by switchboard.
The Burlington Hawk Eye was one of many papers to run the story. An excerpt follows:
Out-of-town callers often had to deal with confused long-distance operators to complete their calls. Directory information, for example, lists the Grand River switchboard number as only “0006.”
“The biggest reason for the change was the people away from here having trouble getting their calls in here,” said Ruth Bowles, 77, who with her husband, Royal, 78, managed the phone system for 39 years until Royal retired in 1977.
Mrs. Bowles will place the last call on the crank system at 1 p.m. Saturday when the Mutual Telephone Corp. of Princeton, Missouri, takes over.
The system cost around $800,000 to install; residents saw their monthly rate go from $6.04 to $10.50 for a basic dial phone or $12 for a push-button phone. Operators from the old switch-board system gathered for a final time the night before the change, in “a smoke-filled frame house down the street from the new automated switching center.”
“When it was first in the news that we were going out, we had calls from everywhere,” said Sue Barton, operator and bookkeeper for the company.
Ms. Barton said she and the other operators, Margaret Crees, Minerva Logan, Helen Camden and Virginia Thomas, are resigned to their pending layoffs.
Russell Vanderflught, a lineman for 17 years and manager for the last three years, said the old cracnk phones and other equipment from the system will probably be auctioned [the following spring], with proceeds divided among company employees.
The operators ran the switchboard 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Bryant Pond, Maine, was the last community in the united states to go to dial phones. The change was made on October 11, 1983.