Jacon Eldridge Early Pioneer Scott County

Jacob Mullen Eldridge learned early that survival meant motion. His mother died when he was four, his grandfather when he was thirteen, and from then on he worked for everything he had—hauling freight, saving his pay, buying his own wagon team. By twenty-one, he’d heard enough about the new town of Davenport to risk it all on the promise of the frontier.

 He left Philadelphia in the fall of 1845 and rolled into Rock Island two months later, tired and broke. Davenport was just across the Mississippi then—a rough little settlement with muddy streets and big dreams. Eldridge bought land northeast of town for $1.25 an acre, planted an orchard, and built a house. Thirty years later, he sold the same land for $125 an acre and named the ridge after his home state—Jersey Ridge Road.

 

He was part dreamer, part salesman. One of the first land agents in eastern Iowa, he spent the 1850s advertising farmland in New York and Washington newspapers, urging readers to “Go West, young man.” That line would later be pinned to Horace Greeley, but people in Davenport knew who said it first.

 He flipped stores and property with a gambler’s instinct—groceries, dry goods, hats, stoves, whatever looked profitable. He was also there at the birth of the Republican Party, a delegate to the 1855 Iowa City convention and later to the 1872 gathering that nominated Greeley for president.

 

Eldridge backed every sign of progress that came his way—railroads, bridges, streetcars. He helped push the Chicago & Rock Island line across the river and into Iowa, shaping the route that became the Rock Island Railroad. In 1871, he laid out a new town and gave it his name: Eldridge, Iowa.

 

When he died in 1902, they called him the “Encyclopedia of Local History.” He’d earned it. Jacob Eldridge had watched Davenport rise from a muddy outpost to a thriving city—and left his mark on nearly every acre.