Muscatine Business District Lit Up At Night

The Muscatine Journal published this image of the city's buisness district all lit up under the new illumination system. The lights were turned on at 8 p.m. on February 1, 1928, by the Queen of Light (unidentified). (colorized version of black and white newspaper image)

A Demon In Human Form: The Van Winkle Murders At Fairport

Harry Jones

“Sometime during the night,” reported the Muscatine Journal, “a demon in human form visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. Will Van Winkle.”

By daylight on December 4, 1907, Fairport knew they weren’t exaggerating. William and Anna Van Winkle lay dead on the bedroom floor, beaten until their skulls gave way. Blood soaked the bedding, streaked the walls, and pooled darkly on the floorboards. It wasn’t a clean kill. It was violence that left nothing to misunderstand.

The Van Winkles were young, broke, and new to married life. William, 23, was a section hand for the Rock Island railroad, one of dozens of men who spent their days swinging tools along frozen track. Anna was twenty. They’d been married four months and lived in a drafty little home that barely deserved to be called one. They had no money, no enemies, and no business dying the way they did.

People knew almost immediately who’d done it. Or who they thought had done it.

Clara L. Brandt Muscatine Iowa Philanthropist

Clara L. Brandt grew up in the wooded country outside Muscatine. She and her sister Emma spent their childhood exploring those rock formations along Pine Creek, so when people started chipping at the stone and hauling off souvenirs, Clara took it personally. She bought the land to keep it safe.

She kept things simple. She hired a watchman, fixed what vandals damaged, and let scientists explore the ravines. She wasn’t trying to build a park; she was just doing what made sense to her.

When Iowa set up its Conservation Commission, she and Emma donated the land—first the main 67 acres, then the family homestead beside it.

Those donations became the core of Wildcat Den State Park. The cliffs, the quiet trails, the cool shadowed canyons—they’re still there because she paid attention when most people didn’t think places like that needed saving.

Her generosity didn’t end with the land. In her will, she supported her church at New Era, helped Moline Lutheran Hospital, and provided for people she cared about. She used the income from her Chicago property to keep those gifts going.

Clara Brandt died in 1930.

Muscatine The Button Capitol of the World

Hawkeye Button Factory, circa 1910

Muscatine, Iowa — 1890. A German immigrant named John F. Boepple goes for a swim in the Mississippi River, slices his foot open on a clamshell, and somehow invents an empire. The man bleeds into the river, looks down at his injury, and sees the face of capitalism smiling back. He scoops up a few shells, limps home, and starts cutting buttons out of them in his kitchen. A local merchant gives him a dime. That dime turns into forty-three factories. The clams never stood a chance.

By 1910, Muscatine was the button capital of America — a riverfront fever dream of clattering presses, stinking shell heaps, and half the town choking on pearl dust. Fifteen percent of the nation’s buttons came out of this little Midwestern pressure cooker. Three thousand people lived and died by the rhythm of those machines. The Des Moines Register said the average worker made twelve dollars a week. The unions said that was a fairy tale.

Pauline Lang, a button worker with lungs full of mother-of-pearl powder, told the San Francisco Labor Council the truth: “The men were receiving but six to seven dollars a week… many of them toiling in water to their knees. The women and children received as low as three dollars… in rooms where the dust was so thick that many of them contracted blood poison and consumption.”