Samaritan Mission in Des Moines Iowa

Bread & soup line at Samaritan Mission in Des Moines

The line outside the Samaritan Mission on East 5th Street often began forming before the sun was up. Men, women, and children waited quietly for a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. Major Leroy Howver, who ran the mission at 308 E. 5th, promised they would keep feeding people all winter if that’s what it took. And by the look of the crowds, it was going to take a lot.

That first day told the entire story. Some people were so hungry they didn’t take time to carry their soup home—they ate it right there in the mission. Others brought whatever they could find to hold enough food to share with their families: big kettles, dented buckets, even old lard pails. One elderly woman arrived with two tiny tin cups. She filled them, and sat down, too tired and hungry to wait. A young child in ragged clothes carried a kettle almost as big as himself.

The Samaritan Mission was undenominational and survived entirely on donations. In a winter when so many had nothing, the mission gave out more than soup. It offered a place where people could stand together, warm up, and remember they weren’t forgotten. On good days, the mission had food, clothes, and coal it could send home with needy families.

Picture and storyline from the Des Moines Register. December 21, 1924.

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs Maysville Iowa Turkey Farmer

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs and some of her turkeys

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs didn’t set out to build the largest turkey farm in Iowa. She just had an idea, one of those quiet, stubborn ideas that settles in your chest and refuses to leave. Her friends and neighbors near Maysville tried to talk her out of it. “Turkeys are impossible to raise,” they said. “They die if you look at them wrong.” But she didn’t budge. She bought a book called Hints for Amateur Poultry Raisers, propped it open on the kitchen table, and started anyway.

The early days were rough. The first twelve eggs gave her one bird—one tiny, lonely turkey. The rest hatched and died as if trying to tell her: “Turkey raising doesn’t pay. We told you so.”Anyone else might’ve quit, but she tried again. The second batch—twelve demanding little birds—felt like the universe giving her a reluctant nod.

 

From there, it snowballed. She added more birds until by November 1930 her farm was home to nearly six hundred turkeys. She built four sheds, fenced in a long run, that protected her flock from thieves, coyotes, and every other creature that thought a turkey looked like lunch. By spring, she planned to top a thousand birds.

Italian Boxer Primo Carnera in the Tri-Cities

Primo Carnera (left), Al Singer (right)

Primo Carnera hit the Tri-Cities like a runaway circus elephant that suddenly decided to walk upright and take questions. People had whispered about him for months—the giant from Italy. He was built like a locomotive—six-foot-eight, two-eighty-five, wearing size-23 shoes that looked less like footwear and more like state-issued pontoons.

The papers printed a photo of Carnera looming over Al Singer, the Bronx firecracker who usually strutted into a ring like he owned the joint. Next to Carnera, he looked like some doomed newsboy drafted into mythology by mistake. Singer was coiled and ready. Carnera looked like he was debating whether to punch, or simply let gravity do the job.

He wasn’t here to fight. Just an exhibition match on July 10, 1930, at the Palmer School’s open-air arena. A chance for the locals to gawk at something their brains refused to classify as normal. Crowds swarmed him. They wanted to touch the hands, measure the shoulders, stare at the monstrous shoes and swear they weren’t hallucinating.

For a few days that summer, the Tri-Cities felt wired with electricity—like the whole place had been plugged into some great brutal engine. Carnera wandered through town, enormous and unhurried, and people followed him just to make sure the giant was real and not something conjured out of heat, rumor, and American hunger for spectacle.

Mrs. Kenneth Bowman Saved Her Children From A Barn Fire

Mrs Kenneth Brown and her children

Maquoketa, Iowa. July 9, 1930. It started like any other morning. Mrs. Kenneth Bowman was doing her chores when she realized her three boys and her little sister, Cora Beth—had climbed into the hayloft to see a baby pigeon.

Then the loft burst into flames. No warning, no time for panic. She just ran—pulled Warren Lee, Owen, little Neale, and Cora Beth out of the smoke one by one, moving on instinct while the heat snapped behind her.

People tried to make sense of it afterward. Investigators said someone had used dynamite to break apart the tightly packed hay so it would burn faster. It sounded impossible until you saw how fast the fire moved.

By the time the flames died, seven buildings were gone. Only the farmhouse, the separator shed, and a barn across the road were still standing.

Neighbors called Mrs. Bowman a hero. She probably didn’t feel like one, but those kids are alive because she didn’t stop to think.

Elsie Swender Pushed for the Death Penalty

Elsie Swender

In the fall of 1920-something, when most people did everything short of faking typhoid to avoid jury duty, 24-year-old Elsie Swender marched into the courthouse like it was opening night on Broadway. She told the Register she “wouldn’t have missed jury duty for the world.” Not even for a date, a promotion, or the promise of free chocolates at Younkers.

She got the Joe Williams murder trial—one of the most closely watched cases of the year. It was her first time on a jury, and she took to it with a kind of fervor usually reserved for revival tent preachers and championship wrestling fans. From the moment the jurors filed into the deliberation room, Elsie planted her feet and fired her opening salvo: death penalty.

According to the paper, she wasn’t just in favor of it. She was one of the most aggressive jurors pushing for it. She preached. She argued. She held the floor like she had been waiting her whole life for this exact moment. “Our first vote was for the death penalty,” she told the reporter, half proud, half disappointed. “I sure did a lot of preaching.”

Eight jurors strongly favored first-degree murder. Elsie was among them, doing everything she could to swing the remaining four to her side. She tried logic. She tried emotion. She tried whatever it is a 24-year-old uses when she’s suddenly the most forceful person in a room full of grown adults deciding a man’s fate.

How Santa Claus Came to Des Moines in 1923

Santa Claus on his way to the Younker 
Brother store, with acting mayor,
Mrs. C. H. Morris

Santa blew into Des Moines on November 17, 1923, long before anyone expected him. Kids weren’t ready. Parents weren’t ready. Even the weather wasn’t ready. Yet there he was, swooping in like Christmas couldn’t wait another minute.

By sunrise, thousands of children were already downtown, crowding the sidewalks and pressing their noses to the toy-land windows of the big stores. One reporter joked the shelves held enough toys “to fill the bags of 10,000 Saint Nicks,” and judging by the wide-eyed faces in the crowds, most kids believed that was true.

 

The Des Moines Tribune swore that “never in the history of Des Moines has Christmas spirit gotten off to an earlier start than this year,” and they weren’t kidding. There was a Christmas parade, free taxi rides, and chocolate teddy bears—real chocolate teddy bears—dropping out of the sky.

 

Santa made his grand entrance a little after nine o’clock at the Harris-Emery store. He didn’t sneak down a chimney or clomp in with reindeer hooves. He went big. He flew over Des Moines in a high-powered airplane, circling the city like a jolly red barnstormer. Kids pointed at the sky. Mothers shaded their eyes. Fathers muttered things like, “Good grief, he’s actually doing it.”

Davenport Iowa Train Wreck November 1919

Two trains on the Rock Island line collided five miles west of Davenport just after dawn on November 20, 1919.

When help reached the site, the wreck looked unreal. Seven cars were thrown off the tracks—some half-buried in the dirt, others twisted into crooked piles. A cattle car had exploded into splinters. Thirty head of cattle lay dead or dying, their moans drifting across the fields. The Davenport Democrat and Leader said the pitiful sounds could be heard for blocks.

 

How the three-man crew lived through it was a mystery.

 

Engine No. 2529, run by engineer Thorpe, had been crushed into a tangle of iron. The fireman crawled out first on his hands and knees, shaking and scraped raw but alive. A witness said he looked like a man clawing his way out of the jaws of something that meant to kill him.

Russell Farnham Explorer Indian Trader

Russell Farnham

George Davenport partnered with Russell Farnham in 1824. He couldn’t have chosen a more qualified person for his growing enterprise. 

John Jacob Astor was the first to capitalize on the Lewis and Clark’s western explorations. He sent two expeditions to the Pacific coast in the summer of 1807. Captain Jonathan Thorn sailed around Cape Horn to the Pacific coast. Astor selected 23-year-old Russell Farnham to lead the cross-country expedition, following Lewis and Clark’s footsteps. Farnham handpicked a crew of seventy frontiersmen and started up the Missouri River to its headwaters. 

 

The expedition wintered at the mouth of the Milk River. When spring came, they pushed on to the Columbia River. By the time Farnham reached his objective in October 1808, just seven men remained of the seventy who started. 

 

Unfortunately, Farnham arrived at the designated meeting place just in time to see the ships sail away. He waited three weeks, hoping they would return for him, then set off on foot across the country to make the return journey. By the time he reached his previous wintering spot on the Milk River, Farnham was the only man left. 

How Davenport Iowa Got It's Name

George Davenport

After the Black Hawk War ended, George Davenport turned most of his attention to land speculation. Davenport was part of a party that laid out the town of Stephenson (formerly Farnhamsburg) in 1834.

The following year, nine men gathered around the fireplace of Colonel William Davenport to lie out a new city on the Iowa side of the river. They included Colonel William Davenport, Commander of Fort Armstrong; Major William Gordon, a United States surveyor; Antoine Le Claire, Indian interpreter; Colonel George Davenport, Major Thomas Smith, Alexander McGregor, Levi S. Colton, Philip Hambaugh, and Captain James May.

The men purchased a quarter section of land, comprising thirty-six blocks from Antoine Le Claire, for $2,000. Each man put up $250, except Colonel William Davenport.

Unstoppable: Iowa's Duke Slater And The Game He Changed

Duke Slater came out of Clinton, Iowa, like a walking thunderclap. Big shoulders, bigger presence, a man who made coaches straighten their backs when he walked past. Reporters called him “a human barricade.” Players called him worse. None of it slowed him down.

He grew up in a world that didn’t expect a Black kid to go anywhere. Slater ignored the script. He pushed through it the way he pushed through defensive lines—head down, legs driving, no apologies.

 

His high school couldn’t afford helmets. Most players hesitated. Slater didn’t. He played bare-headed and kept doing it for the rest of his life. A rival said, “Hitting him was like running into a stone wall.” Another said, “I hit him once. That was enough.”

 

When he got to the University of Iowa, everything changed. The Hawkeyes already had a team. Slater gave them a force of nature.

Great Burlington Ice Cream Heist of 1914

Boys stealing tastes of ice cream on the heat-soaked riverfront

The Great Ice Cream Heist of Burlington didn’t look like a crime wave at first. It slid in slow and sticky, the way trouble sneaks into river towns when the heat gets mean and people get stupid. By July 1914, Burlington was staggering through one of those summers when the Mississippi smelled like dead fish and everyone walked around half-dizzy. Tempers thinned. Judgment wilted. That’s when strange things start moving in the dark.

The Burlington Ice Cream Company started losing tubs off their wagons. Not a pint here or there—five-gallon buckets. At first, it looked like sloppy bookkeeping or a hungry stray. Then the numbers piled up. Fifteen gallons went on Tuesday. Thirty on Thursday. By August, someone had hauled off hundreds of gallons. The Burlington Hawk-Eye called the culprits “ice cream fiends,” adding that “whole tubs vanish nightly.” Another line warned that the city was “plagued by a youthful gang whose appetite exceeds their morals.”

Julebukking in Decorah

A knock at the door, and random masked strangers

Decorah always felt like it was built to survive winter, not enjoy it. The cold didn’t nibble at you—it crawled straight through your coat and took up residence in your bones. The Norwegians who settled there understood the cold. They’d lived with storms that could erase entire villages, so when they brought julebukking with them—this odd little winter ritual—it didn’t feel like an import. It felt like a warning that old traditions don’t die; they just change latitudes.

Julebukking was never a spectacle. No carolers in neat rows. No cheerful postcards. No marching band in red hats. It was smaller, stranger, and more intimate. It thing started with a knock after dark—the kind that froze a room mid-sentence. A knock with weight to it. A knock that carried old-country ghosts on its back.

The children always heard it first. They stiffened like animals catching a scent. Adults tried to look unconcerned, but the winter air came into the house in a new way when julebukk night rolled around. Everyone felt it.

Christkindl in Eastern Iowa

Children placing boots by the door on Christmas Eve

Christkindl came to eastern Iowa the way December storms did—quietly at first, then all at once. By the 1860s, the river towns of Davenport, Guttenberg, Elkader, and the communal streets of Amana carried the sound of German carols through the cold air, and it was hard to tell where old-world memory ended and new-world habit began.

The newspapers rarely explained the holiday. They assumed everyone already knew. When they mentioned it, they spoke in plain sentences. A Davenport editor said , “The German families prepare for Christkindl as their parents did before them.”

 

Children placed boots outside their doors on Christmas Eve. Big boots, if they had them. Little ones polished until they reflected lamplight. The Christkindl—not Santa, not St. Nicholas, but something more gentle—was said to slip inside the houses after the family had gone to bed. “The Christ-child brings the gifts,” the Iowa Reform explained, “and no child should seek to spy upon its coming.” Parents repeated the rule with the solemnity of a town ordinance.

 

Sinterklaas Comes to Pella

Sinterklaas came to Pella the way most things did in the 1800s—carried across an ocean, held together by memory, and kept alive because people needed something familiar in a place that was still trying to decide what it wanted to be.

Every December 5th, Dutch families lit their lamps a little earlier. Children took out their wooden shoes and lined them near the door, polished as best as small hands could manage. Nobody said it outright, but the shoes mattered. A good shine suggested good behavior. A scuffed heel hinted at mischief. Children hoped Sinterklaas wouldn’t notice.

 

The Pella Gazette said, “The little ones prepare their shoes with great care, and the streets ring with their anticipation.” That was about as emotional as the paper got, but you could tell the editor enjoyed the spectacle.

Dubuque Christmas Market

The Christmas market on Main Street always arrived early in Dubuque. It didn’t sneak in. It simply appeared one morning, as if dropped there by a tired hand. By the 1860s, everyone expected it. By the 1890s, nobody could imagine December without it.

The Dubuque Herald tried to explain the thing every year. It usually gave up by the second paragraph. Crowds were too big, smells too mixed, vendors too hopeful. “Main Street bustles with the commerce of the season,” the paper wrote in one of its calmer years, leaving the rest to the reader.

 

The smell was the first sign. Pine wreaths stacked in carts. Wet horses cooling in the snow. Oysters that had traveled too far, too fast, and looked a little startled by the journey. The Herald said, “A mild aroma accompanies the oyster barrels.” Mild was one word for it.