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.
