What’s With the Steel Plant for Southeast Iowa—and What’s It Going To Cost You?

 

Fifteen billion dollars. That’ll get your attention. Add thousands of jobs and a giant steel plant in Lee County, and it sounds like southeast Iowa just hit the jackpot.

Maybe it did. But there’s a lot of ground between an announcement in Washington and workers collecting paychecks in Iowa.

President Donald Trump and Gov. Kim Reynolds say Mesabi Metallics plans to build the plant. The Minnesota company, owned by India’s Essar Group, is promising 1,750 permanent jobs and up to 6,000 construction jobs. The goal is to start making steel in 2030.

Iowa’s offering roughly $1.36 billion in state incentives to help land it. That’s a big price tag, even spread over years. So what are we buying, and what happens if we don’t get it?

Trump can announce the project, push for it, and help line up federal support. He can’t sit in Washington and approve Iowa’s tax breaks. The state has to do that.

As of October 6, Iowa was still negotiating with the company. Mesabi needed to apply, the contract needed to be finished, and the state’s economic development board needed to approve it. They announced the prize before they finished the deal.

Spaudling Manufacturing Company Grinnell Iowa

 

(Des Moines Tribune. March 6, 1914)

“You’ve seen the kind of corn and pigs I raise. Well, the auto I make is just as good.”

 

It’s not the pitch you’d expect from an auto manufacturer, but Henry Spaulding wasn’t your typical businessman. He came to Iowa in 1876 with his own ideas about business.

 

His ads didn’t contain any fancy talk about engineering. Just a fat Iowa farmer smoking a cigar, holding a Spaulding automobile like he’d grown the thing behind the barn.

 

The ad had some nerve to it.

 

The Spaulding was built in Grinnell, Iowa, and the company wasn’t shy about saying so. It was an Iowa car, made for Iowa people and Iowa roads.

 

Those roads weren’t much to brag about. They turned to mud in the spring and dust in the summer. Ruts grabbed the wheels. Bridges looked temporary because most of them were. Sometimes the road just wandered off and left you sitting in a field.

 

Spaulding built a car for that.

Clinton’s $20 Million Data Center Deal: Gift, Bribe, or Just Business?

 

Twenty million dollars.

That’s the number getting everyone’s attention in Clinton.

A company wants to explore building a massive data center outside of town. In the middle of all the talk about electricity, farmland, noise, and water comes the sweetener: $20 million for a new athletic complex.

Basketball courts. Ball fields. Exercise facilities. Community rooms.

Clinton has talked about this project since 2017.

Just a few months ago, city leaders were discussing a $10 million to $16 million facility. Mayor Scott Maddasion said taxpayers might have to vote on a referendum to help pay for it.

Then QTS entered the picture. Suddenly, Clinton wasn’t talking about asking taxpayers for the money. Someone else might write the check.

Sounds pretty good. Maybe too good. Because companies don’t hand cities $20 million for the fun of it. QTS isn’t sitting around worrying about where Clinton kids are going to play basketball next winter.

They want something. The question is what?

Some Clinton residents are calling the $20 million a bribe. That’s a loaded word. Legally, there’s no evidence it’s a bribe. But you can understand why people say it.

Imagine your neighbor wants to build a giant factory next to your house. You complain about the noise, traffic, and what it might do to your property value. Then he says, “By the way, I’ll build the neighborhood a new swimming pool.” You might really want the pool. But you’d probably ask a few more questions before grabbing your swimsuit.

That’s where Clinton is right now.

Early Iowa Breweries

 

An early Iowa brewery, circa 1850-1860

Here’s a snapshot of Iowa’s early brewing days, pulled from One Hundred Years of Brewing (1901).

Davenport got in early. Mathias Frahm opened the first brewery around 1848 or 1849. After that, things picked up fast. The Pacific Brewery went up in 1853. The Severance Ale Brewery followed. The Eagle Brewery showed up in 1858. Around the same time, the Arsenal Brewery opened its doors. For a while, it felt like everybody in town was brewing something.

After the Civil War, it kept growing. Julius Lehrkind built the Blackhawk Brewery, lost it to a fire, then turned around and built another one.

By the 1890s, things shifted. Bigger operations took over. Smaller breweries faded out. The Zoller Brothers built a new Black Hawk Brewery in 1892, and a lot of the earlier names quietly disappeared.

Sioux City Telephone Company 1907

The Sioux City Journal published this picture of the operations center of the Sioux City Telephone Company on February 17, 1907. Pictured are: Milton S. Crandall, wire chief; and Irma Markley.

Muscatine Company Starts Work on “Littlemac” Auto Plant

In late 1929, the Thompson Motor Corporation began construction on a new automobile manufacturing plant in Muscatine, with plans to build a small, lightweight car unlike anything else on the road.

The company was led by Herbert G. Thompson, mayor of Muscatine. The new venture was capitalized at $1 million and aimed to produce three different models of a compact automobile called the “Littlemac.”

The Littlemac was designed to weigh less than half as much as a typical light car of the day. The vehicle would weigh about 1,100 pounds and stand between five and six feet high. Despite its smaller size, the company claimed it could reach speeds of 75 miles per hour.

It featured a 50-inch wheelbase and a 40-inch tread. A specially designed axle system was built to keep the car steady while turning corners. Power came from an 18-horsepower Red Seal Continental engine.

Davenport Locomotive Company Engine Used In China

Des Moines Register. September 14, 1930.

The Des Moines Register printed this picture of the Number One locomotive on China's K. P. Railroad. It was made by the Davenport Locomotive Company and has been in service for years. 

Radio Station WOC Davenport Iowa

Dr. Frank W. Elliott, vice president and business manager of Palmer School of Chiropractic (left), was in charge of the WOC radio station at Davenport. Peter McArthur (right), worked as an announcer on the station.

An accompanying article said the station’s slogan was: “Where the west begins and in the state where the tall corn grows.”

At the time the article was written in 1925, the station was “selling good will.” Its advertising was “wholly indirect.” It discouraged “any direct selling methods.”

How times have changed.

Picture: Des Moines Register. December 6, 1925.

The Union Brewery and Iowa City Beer

Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s

The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired, considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”

The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.

 

By 1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip hotter than the kettles.

Mason Motor Car Company Des Moines Iowa

Mason Motor Co. ad, 1906

The first thing you need to know about the Mason Motor Car Company is that it never should have worked. Not in Des Moines, not in 1906, not in a state where most people still trusted a good horse over any contraption that hissed, rattled, and tried to kill you on a dirt road. Yet for a few bright, reckless years, two brothers with machine oil on their hands and speed on their minds tried to drag Iowa—kicking, screaming, and occasionally bleeding—into the automobile age.

Fred and August Duesenberg weren’t normal. They looked at a peaceful bicycle and thought, What if this thing went 60 miles an hour and tried to shake its rider’s fillings out? The Des Moines Daily News called them “the sort of young men who consider mechanical noise to be a form of conversation.” They were tinkerers, racers, mechanics, engineers—whatever you want to call them—but above all, they were hungry. Hungry for speed, recognition, and the clean snapping sound an engine makes when it finds its rhythm and behaves. So when Des Moines attorney Edward Mason threw some money at them and said, “Make a car,” they didn’t hesitate. They built the Mason, a small, explosive two-cylinder machine that rattled windows, terrified horses, and made its owners feel like they were cheating death—or at least borrowing trouble from it.

 

Raymond J. Bischoff The Iowa Ponzi

Raymond J. Bischoff

“Someday, I’ll be a millionaire,” Raymond J. Bischoff told the kids outside Van Buren School, lighting a cigarette like a man with inside information. “I’m not going to work hard for a living.” 

 The others laughed. Of course they did. Nobody from Fifth & Pine Streets becomes a millionaire, not with a father pulling twenty-two cents an hour at the Independent Malting Company, or driving beer trucks through the West End mud.

 

His mother married a blind man after the divorce, which did nothing to raise morale in the Bischoff household. Frank Davis could feel the world but not see it. Maybe that’s where Raymond learned to fake things — to see with words instead of eyes.

 

He started young. A teenage magazine hustler in the Putnam Building, taking orders, cashing checks, then vanishing like a phantom publisher. No magazines ever arrived, of course, but Raymond did. He always came back, a different man each time.

 

In 1917, he was back in Davenport calling himself Sergeant D. C. Breckenridge of Canada’s Princess Patricia Regiment — a fine, heroic-sounding outfit, except for the minor issue that it had been annihilated at Ypres. Only ten men survived, and everyone of them had a better story than Raymond. But that didn’t stop him. He said the Canadians wouldn’t take him because “Bischoff” sounded too German. So he’d done the sensible thing: shed his Teutonic skin and re-emerged as a full-blooded hero. D. C. Breckenridge.