Academy of the Immaculate Conception at Davenport, Iowa

The Academy of the Immaculate Conception sat on a Davenport hill like it owned the place—which, in a way, it did. Built in 1859 and run by the Sisters of Charity, it was where Iowa girls went to learn how to outthink the world. The sisters taught science, music, math, and probably a little bit of rebellion, whether they meant to or not.

For nearly a hundred years, it buzzed with piano music, ink stains, and dreams too big to fit in a classroom. In 1958, the Academy merged with St. Ambrose to become Assumption High. The building didn’t disappear. These days it’s part of Palmer College of Chiropractic.

The Lockridge Moster

Tracks in the mud, scatnottered turkey feathers--not human

October 1975. Lockridge, Iowa. Population small enough to know who’s in church and who’s not. Then something started killing turkeys. Not clean kills, either—these birds were torn apart, like something angry had come out of the timber hungry for chaos.

A farmer named Bill Beavers made the first call. Said he found ten-inch footprints stamped deep in the mud, wide as a man’s palm. “Didn’t look like no animal I ever seen,” he told the Fairfield Ledger. The cops came out, looked around, scratched their heads, and left with nothing but cigarette smoke and a few plaster casts that didn’t make sense.

Beavers said he saw it one night—black, hairy, broad shoulders, eyes catching the light. He fired his gun, it ran. Left behind that smell every farm kid knows: wet fur and something rotting. The Des Moines Register ran a short piece about it—“Iowa’s Own Monster,” they called it—and suddenly the little town of Lockridge had more reporters than cattle.

Henry Clay Dean Iowa Orator Preacher & Agitator

Henry Clay Dean

Henry Clay Dean was born loud. He entered the world in 1822 in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, with a voice like thunder and opinions to match. By the time he could walk, he was arguing with adults. By the time he could read, he was preaching to fence posts. People said he was born to save the Republic or set it on fire.

He went to college in Virginia, studied law, then ditched it all to become a Methodist preacher—because shouting in court didn’t give him enough range. Dean could make sinners cry and atheists consider hedging their bets. His sermons weren’t polite little Sunday affairs. They were explosions—half scripture, half outrage, and all Henry. “He believed in God,” one man said, “and in Henry Clay Dean, in that order.”

 

When he moved to Iowa in the 1840s, the frontier was still a muddy sprawl of log churches and whiskey. Dean built congregations with fire and sarcasm. His beard grew wild, his eyes burned bright, and his voice could shake rafters. He married, had children, and somehow found time to write angry letters to newspapers about everything from bad theology to bad roads.

 

He had a gift for offending the right people. He loved to debate and hated to lose. When a heckler said his sermons were “too long and too loud,” Dean shot back, “That’s the same complaint sinners make about hell.” The crowd roared. The heckler left early.

James Baird Weaver Iowa Politician Populist Greenback

James Baird Weaver, age 60

James Baird Weaver was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1833—tall, loud, and sure of himself before he could spell “politics.” His family moved to Iowa when it was still a muddy promise of a state. They built fences, fought grasshoppers, and prayed for rain. Weaver grew up believing hard work should count for something, and that it usually didn’t.

 He went east for school, learned law, and came back ready to make noise. When the Civil War hit, and Weaver joined the 2nd Iowa Infantry, fought at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, and came home with a general’s star and a head full of ideas about freedom and fairness. “A nation that can save itself with blood,” he said, “can save itself with justice.”

 

After the war, he tried being a Republican. It didn’t take. It had turned into a party of bankers, and Weaver couldn’t stomach it. He watched farmers losing their land while railroads fattened on government favors. He said the country was “run by men who never plowed an acre or swung a hammer.” That line stuck. Iowa farmers started quoting it over coffee and seed corn catalogs.

 

Weaver’s enemies called him dangerous. He called himself “an honest radical.” He wasn’t the kind to back down or smooth out his edges. “I never learned to whisper,” he said. “The truth should be spoken loud enough for the thieves to hear.”

Annie Nowlin Savery Des Moines Iowa Suffragette

Annie Nowlin Savery was all lace and lightning—smart, restless, and way too opinionated for a world that preferred its women quiet and breakable. She married James Savery, a businessman with money, charm, and no idea what kind of storm he’d invited to dinner. While he built hotels and railroads, Annie built a revolution.

She threw herself into every cause that promised to make the world a little less stupid—abolition, temperance, women’s rights. Her parlor became a war room for reformers. Picture velvet chairs, cigars, and Susan B. Anthony sitting by the fire planning how to blow up the patriarchy (politely, of course, with pamphlets). Annie wrote editorials so sharp they could slice wallpaper, and she never apologized for making men uncomfortable. “Mrs. Savery’s courage is not of the quiet kind,” one newspaper said.

When people told her that women shouldn’t talk politics, she invited them over and made them listen. When they said women couldn’t own property, she told them to read the law again because she was going to change it. Her energy was nuclear before anyone knew what that meant.

James Young and Family Jackson County Iowa

James and Amanda Young and Family

James Young was born in Pennsylvania in 1841. Two years later his family headed west to Jackson County, Iowa. His father built a mill and a log house beside it, and James grew up working in the mill.

He stayed there until 1867, when he married Amanda Pierce. The next spring, he and his brother David bought land in Jones County. They worked it until they split the acres and went their own ways. James stayed and farmed his share.

In 1882 he moved to Madison Township, bought more land, and raised seven children. He served two terms as justice of the peace and backed the Prohibition Party, believing liquor was the country’s worst evil.

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.

Orchestra Leader Glenn Miller

Born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1904, Glenn Miller came into the world wired tight and slightly out of tune—a man already chasing the rhythm no one else could hear. He wasn’t some dreamy jazz poet. He was an engineer in a suit, obsessed with sound the way gamblers obsess over dice. “A band ought to have a sound all its own,” he said. “It ought to have a personality.”

By the late 1930s, Miller had wrung that sound out of America’s nervous system. It wasn’t raw jazz—it was something slicker, faster, built for motion. You could hear it bouncing off jukeboxes in hotel lobbies and bus depots from Chicago to New Orleans. “In the Mood” didn’t ask you to dance—it commanded it. “Moonlight Serenade” wasn’t a love song; it was anesthesia. A New York critic said his music was “too perfect, too polite, too damn smooth.” Another said, “You can’t fight it. It gets in your bloodstream and stays there.”

Miller didn’t conduct—he controlled. Every arrangement was dissected, cleaned, and polished until not a single breath was out of place. “You’re sharp by a hair,” he told a trombonist. “Shave it off.” His musicians swore he could hear a wrong note through a hurricane. They feared him, respected him, maybe even loved him, though no one dared say it out loud.

Mamie Doud Eisenhower

Mamie Doud Eisenhower

Mary Geneva “Mamie” Doud Eisenhower was born in Boone, Iowa, in 1896. Her father was a successful meatpacker; her mother believed in good manners, good friends, and never running out of cake. Mamie grew up cheerful, social, and full of energy. “I was a chatterbox from the beginning,” she liked to say, and no one who met her ever disagreed.

She met Dwight Eisenhower in Texas in 1915, when he was a young Army lieutenant with big ears, a friendly smile, and zero money. “He had the nicest smile I’d ever seen,” she said. He was equally gone on her. “I’m walking on air,” he wrote after their first date. They were married that summer and spent the next fifty years in a love story that was half war zone, half road trip.

Army life was no picnic. They moved constantly—Panama, the Philippines, Washington, Denver. Over two dozen homes in thirty years. “The only thing we ever owned that wasn’t government issue,” she joked, “was our dog.” She learned to make a home out of whatever walls the Army handed her. “Home,” she said, “is wherever Ike happens to be.”

She turned chaos into order with a smile and a clipboard. Other officers’ wives adored her. “She was tiny but commanding,” one said. “You just wanted to do what she said.” Her secret was charm and discipline in equal measure. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you Mamie wasn’t tough,” an aide once said. “She was steel in satin.”

Keokuk Iowa Actor Conrad Nagel

Born in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1897, Conrad Nagel was one of Hollywood’s original leading men. He wasn’t the wild or brooding type. He knew where the exits were and how to use them.

Nagel got his start in silent films, where his calm confidence stood out against the flailing theatrics of the era. In The Mysterious Lady (1928), he held his own opposite Greta Garbo. Critics called him “the actor with the thoughtful eyes.” One said, “Nagel brings sincerity to roles that would collapse under a lesser man’s charm.” Another dubbed him “Hollywood’s gentleman.”

 

When sound arrived, his low, clear voice made him one of the few silent stars to easily transition into talkies. He starred in The Divorcee (1930) with Norma Shearer, a role that earned him an Academy Award nomination. MGM used him wherever they needed moral steadiness: the lawyer, husband, and suitor who  seemed too honorable for his own good.

 

In the 1930s and 1940s as movie roles disappeared, Nagel moved to radio. He hosted and acted in dozens of radio dramas. His voice became a familiar presence in living rooms across the country. He co-created and hosted The Silver Theatre, a prestige anthology that ran nearly a decade. He loved radio because “you could play any role and never worry if your hair was in place.” It was steady work, too, as younger stars crowded him out of Hollywood.