Julia Addington First Iowa Women Elected to a Public Office

Julia Addington

Iowa in 1869 was prairie grass, muddy boots, the smell of wood smoke, and cornfields so wet you could probably grow rice in them. The Civil War was over, the railroads were slicing across the country like a drunk with a butter knife, and women were—well, not running for office. They were mostly running households, running after children, or running out of patience. But in Mitchell County, one small, unstoppable teacher decided she was done grading papers and ready to grade society.

 Julia Addington wasn’t loud, or rich, or politically connected. She didn’t have a campaign slogan. She probably didn’t even have time for one, because she was busy teaching actual children who probably didn’t wash their hands or understand personal space.

 

She’d been born in New York in 1829, which was so long ago that “light” was still a luxury item. Her family just kept moving west until they ran out of trees—Wisconsin, then northern Iowa—places where the “curriculum” was basically: don’t die, and try to spell your own name before winter sets in.

 

Julia loved learning. She taught everywhere—Cedar Falls, Waterloo, Des Moines, Osage—basically, if there was a building and two kids who could sit still for ten minutes, she was there. One of her students later said, “She never raised her voice, yet no boy ever dared to cross her.” Translation: terrifying in the most polite way possible.

Stephen Sumner Phelps Oquawka Iowa Pioneer

Stephen Sumner Phelps

They came west one by one in those years—traders, drifters, gamblers, men who wanted more room to breathe or to disappear. Stephen Sumner Phelps was one of them. Born in 1805 in Palmyra, New York. He left with a rifle, a pack of trade goods, and a look that said he wasn’t coming back.

The river took him first. Illinois River, 1820s. He built his first post near Starved Rock, on the Illinois River in the 1820s—rough logs and river mud, smoke curling through the pines. The Potawatomi came down in canoes, loaded with furs. Phelps met them with powder, beads, and whiskey that burned all the way down. A frontier editor later wrote, “Trade here is a trembling peace—one wrong word and the hills will answer in fire.”

When the trade thinned, he went north to Galena. Lead country. Holes in the ground, money if you lived long enough to spend it. He and his brother Alexis dug deep, struck ore, then sickness. “He came close to death,” the family said. Lead in the lungs. Lead in the blood. He left the mines crawling and never went back.

He floated south to the Mississippi, following the brown current until the trees thinned and the banks sagged. Yellow Banks, they called it—Oquawka now. A spit of mud and driftwood. He built a store, bought canoes, and started over. The Sauk and Fox came to trade. They called him Wah-wash-e-ne-qua—Hawkeye. The man who sees far.

Carrie Chapman Catt: The Strategist Behind Women's Suffrage

Carrie Chapman Catt in 1916

Carrie Chapman Catt was born in 1859, when the world was full of men explaining things. They were very good at it. They explained women shouldn’t go to college, shouldn’t speak in public, and certainly shouldn’t vote. Carrie, being a curious sort, wanted to know why. Nobody had a suitable answer. That was her first clue that something was off.

 She grew up in Charles City, Iowa, where winter lasts nine months and opinions freeze solid. Her father believed in hard work. Her mother believed in her daughter, though she did it quietly, like a good wife was expected to do. Carrie graduated from Iowa State College, the only woman in her class. Nobody threw a parade. They probably just assumed she’d get married and stop thinking so loudly.

 

She didn’t.

 

She took a job running the Mason City schools. A woman running schools was about as common as a horse running for mayor, but she did it anyway. Test scores went up. The budget balanced. The newspapers said, “She manages men as easily as she teaches children.” Somewhere between the lines, you could hear the men grinding their teeth.

Adeline Morrison Swain Iowa Suffragette

Adeline Morrison Swain

Adeline Swain didn’t ask for permission. She didn’t even notice there was a line she wasn’t supposed to cross. The men of Fort Dodge were too busy puffing cigars and explaining morality to see her coming. Then one day, she walked into the middle of their meeting and rewrote the script.

 Greenback Party convention. 1883. A fine gathering of mustaches and waistcoats, men arguing about gold standards while the world burned outside. Then in walks Adeline Swain — a schoolteacher in a stiff collar — and delivers ten minutes of verbal dynamite about corruption and equality. You could’ve heard a silver dollar drop. By the time the smoke cleared, those same men had nominated her for Superintendent of Public Instruction. The first woman in Iowa ever to get the nod.

 

The local papers choked on their ink. The Fort Dodge Times called her “a curiosity,” which was the polite version of “What the hell was that?” Others said women belonged in the parlor. One reporter called it “petticoat politics.” Adeline used the clippings to light her stove. Nothing like a little hypocrisy to get the fire going.

Albert Baird CumminsThe Most Restless Man in Iowa Politics

Albert Baird Cummins in 1915

Albert Baird Cummins looked like a man who ironed his conscience every morning. Sharp collar, sharper tongue. Born in a Pennsylvania log cabin, he clawed his way to Iowa with a hammer and a law book. A reformer, he said. A Republican, he swore. Somewhere between the two, he lost a few friends and gained a few enemies who looked exactly like him.

 “I am neither radical nor reactionary,” he said. “I am progressive.” That was his favorite trick — claiming middle ground while sawing off both ends of the plank.

 

The Des Moines Register called him “the most restless man in Iowa politics.” They weren’t wrong. Cummins paced like a man waiting for his better angels to catch up. His voice carried that Presbyterian thunder — moral certainty wrapped in prairie dust. “The great evil of our time,” he warned, “is the domination of business in government.” Then he’d smile like a man who knew half the crowd owned stock.

 

He wasn’t the barnstorming type like Teddy Roosevelt, all teeth and testosterone. He was cooler, lawyerly, surgical. Robert La Follette fought with his fists; Cummins fought with commas and tariffs. He talked reform like a judge handing down a sentence. “The law,” he’d say, “isn’t sacred because it’s written down — it’s sacred because it’s right.”

Fort Madison in the Iowa Country

Fort Madison

They came up the river in the summer of 1808, sixty men, led by Lieutenant Alpha Kingsley, a thin, sunburned man with orders that looked clean on paper and smelled like death in the field. The Mississippi rolled brown and heavy beside them. Every splash of an oar felt like a signal. Every treeline whispered, don't stay.

 They built the fort anyway.

 

Logs hacked from the bluffs. Mud and sweat sealing the seams. The air thick with mosquitoes and dread. They called it Fort Madison, named for a president who’d never seen the place. The Sauk and Fox watched from the timberline. Quiet. Patient. 

 

Kingsley said the view was “commanding.” What he meant was exposed. There was a ridge behind the walls, a perfect perch for anyone wanting to shoot down at them. The men knew it. They built anyway, because that’s what soldiers do.

Murder at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home Davenport

George Foulk ate a piece of chocolate, a moment later he was
on the floor fighting for his life

Sunday, October 1, 1905. The mail came to the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport. Bills, church bulletins, a few letters, and one small brown-paper parcel tied with string.

 Nobody panicked. Nobody ever does at first. Packages showed up all the time—mostly socks and Bibles. This one had toys. A ball. A picture book. A doll with yellow yarn hair. And a little sack of chocolate creams. Children love chocolate. Adults love to think of children loving chocolate. That’s how you end up with stories like this.

 

After supper, the matron passed them around. George Foulk, age seven, went first. He said the candy tasted bitter. Nobody listened. A minute later, he was rolling on the floor.

 

Somebody screamed. The doctor ran in, hands shaking, smelling of liniment and coffee. The boy’s body arched like a drawn bow. “Strychnine,” the doctor said. 

 

By morning, the boy was gone, and the entire town was chewing on rumors.

Stone City: The Art Movement That Almost Worked

Instructors at the Stone City Art Colony. (left to right) Grant Wood,
Dave McCosh, Edward B. Rowan, Arnold Pyle, Adrian Dornbush,
and Marvin Cone. Not pictured Florence Sprague Smith

The road to Stone City curved through corn and limestone, pale as bone. The air buzzed with heat. You could smell the river before you saw it.

Then — laughter. Wild, unfiltered laughter bouncing off the quarry walls. That’s how you knew you’d found it.

It was 1932. The country was broke. So were most of the people who came here. They brought brushes, bedrolls, debts. Hope too, the kind that doesn’t last long but burns bright.

Grant Wood was on the porch when they arrived. Round glasses, overalls, a grin that could mean anything. “Don’t just stand there,” he shouted. “Grab a brush or grab a beer!”

Someone did both. Someone else tripped on a paint bucket. It began like that.

The Stone City Art Colony. Fifty bucks for the summer — if you had it. If you didn’t, nobody asked.

Murder in a Small Town - Villisca Axe Murders

Villisca murder house in 1912

June 10, 1912. The Moores—Josiah, his wife Sarah, and their four children—had spent the evening at church. Children’s Day. Laughter, hymns, homemade pie. Two friends, Lena and Ina Stillinger, came home with them for a sleepover. Eight people under one roof. Safe. Ordinary.

Sometime after midnight, the killer arrived.

He came through the back door. Quiet. No signs of forced entry. In his hand, an ax—Josiah’s own.

He started upstairs. Josiah first. Then Sarah. The children next. Room to room. Blow after blow. By the time he reached the Stillinger girls, the house was a slaughterhouse.

He covered their faces. Draped clothing over mirrors and windows. As if ashamed, and trying to hide what he’d done. Then he left the ax in the guest room. Nothing stolen. No footprints. No sound.

Next door, Mary Peckham started her morning the same as always—five o’clock, feed the chickens, sweep the porch. Something was wrong. The Moore house was still. Curtains drawn. Too quiet.

Sculptor Florence Sprague Smith

Sculptor Florence Sprague Smith

Florence Sprague said the stone talked if you let it. She’d hand you a hammer, point to a block, and tell you, “Stop thinking. Listen.” If someone asked her what she meant, she’d shrugged. “Everything worth saying’s already in the rock,” she said. “You just have to shut up long enough to hear it.”

People said she had farmer’s hands and a pianist’s patience. In 1914 she created a bronze called Joy of Labor—a woman mid-stride, sleeves rolled, muscles showing. The Des Moines Register described it as “simple and strong, a hymn to honest work.” 

“Work is beautiful if you let it be,” she told a student who complained about mixing plaster. That was Florence: no theory, just doing. “You don’t need Paris,” she’d say. “You need a place to stand and something worth hitting.”

When Grant Wood started his Stone City Art Colony in the early ’30s, she packed her tools and went. The colony was supposed to give Midwestern artists a reason to stay home instead of chasing New York glory. Florence didn’t need convincing. “We’ve got better stone,” she said, tapping the local limestone. “And cheaper rent.”

Aunt Becky: She Answered To No One And Saved Thousands

Aunt Becky

Sarah Graham Palmer Young was a thirty-two-year-old widow from Ithaca, New York, when she threw herself into the war. After her brothers enlisted, she couldn’t stay home sewing bandages. She kissed her two little girls goodbye, packed a carpetbag, and boarded a southbound train in 1862.

 

She didn’t have any orders, a uniform, or a promise of pay. She just walked into the camp of the 109th New York Volunteers and asked where the sick were. Someone pointed to a tent thick with blood and fever. She went in and stayed.

 

The soldiers called her “Mother.” She snapped, “I’m not that old.” They laughed and called her “Aunt Becky.” Within weeks, she was part of the place. She worked nights, argued with surgeons, and gave her coffee to men who couldn’t lift their heads. She joked with the men when she could, cursed under her breath when supplies ran short, and once told a colonel, “Sir, if you’d been as useful with a needle as you are with that sword, these boys might’ve had decent bandages by now.”

 

She wasn’t trained. No woman was. She learned by doing—pressing on wounds, wrapping stumps, sitting beside the ones who wouldn’t make it till morning. “I did not go to make history,” she said, “but to serve.”

 

Once, near Fredericksburg, she walked six miles through sleet to get rations for her hospital tent. The commissary officer tried to turn her away. She grabbed the wagon reins and drove off before he could stop her. “If you want your mules,” she told him, “come find me at the hospital.”

Arthur Davison Ficke Poet Joker Lawyer

Arthur Davison Ficke

Arthur Davison Ficke liked precision. The feel of a line snapping into rhythm. A rhyme that hit clean. He didn’t chase chaos—he tamed it. Some called him old-fashioned. Some called him a master. Either way, he stood out—a poet from the Iowa plains who wrote like a man from another century.

 He grew up in Davenport, born in 1883 to money and culture. His father was a lawyer and art collector; his mother sharp and literary. The house smelled of books and Japanese prints. While other kids were climbing trees, Ficke was memorizing sonnets. “The law,” he said later, “is the prose of life. Poetry is the appeal.”

 

At Harvard, he studied under William James, traded poems with Witter Bynner, and learned how words could turn philosophical and dangerous at the same time. Then, back to Iowa. Law school. Courtrooms. Briefs by day, poetry by night. He wrote like a man with two hearts—one bound to duty, one drunk on beauty. “The secret joy of writing,” he once said, “is that it never quite obeys you. You aim for truth and end up confessing something else.”

 

His early books were careful, polished things—From the Isles, The Happy Princess, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter. He wrote about art, love, and the uneasy grace of seeing clearly. “There are years that ask questions,” he wrote, “and years that answer.” Critics praised him for form, scolded him for restraint. He didn’t care. “I’ll write it clean,” he told a friend, “even if the world’s gone dirty.”

Iowa Artist Grant Wood: The Man Behind American Gothic

Grant Wood

Grant Wood painted what he knew. The land, the fences, the tired faces that came with the work. He didn’t go looking for beauty. He figured if it was anywhere, it was probably hiding in Iowa.

Wood liked to draw. He worked with his hands doing tin work, sign painting, whatever paid the rent. He wanted to be an artist, but that sounded like a joke in Iowa. Nobody knew any artists. Nobody even knew what one was supposed to do.

He went to Chicago, learned design, then went to Europe to see what all the fuss was about. Paris. Munich. Brussels. He saw paintings that could make a man dizzy, brushstrokes that looked like lightning, and German painters so precise they made bones look carved. He took it all in. Then he came home.

That’s when things changed. He started noticing the way the light slid across a barn roof. How the land folded like cloth. How a face could hold an entire story and still say nothing. He said, “All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.” He meant it.

In 1930, he painted American Gothic. You’ve seen it. Everyone has. The farmer with the pitchfork. The woman beside him. The white house with the church window. Everything sharp, still, and strangely quiet.

Bix Beiderbecke: How A Kid From Iowa Rewrote American Music

Bix Beiderbecke

Bix Beiderbecke grew up in Davenport, Iowa, a river town that smelled of corn and coal smoke. He listened to the steamboats at night, and played piano by ear when he was five. His parents wanted him to stop. He didn’t. Ragtime was dying. Jazz was being born. He was there at the baptism.

The local papers called him the Davenport wonder. They liked him because he was theirs. They didn’t understand him. One early review said his tone “seems to drift from another world.” It did. Eddie Condon said, “He put the cornet to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying yes.”

He joined the Wolverines when he was nineteen. They drove from town to town in a beat-up car, sleeping in barns, playing dance halls. Bandmate Jimmy Hartwell, said, “We didn’t make much money, but when Bix played, it felt like we were rich.” Another remembered him sitting up all night, rewriting a tune until it sounded like water.

By 1924 he was recording. “Fidgety Feet.” “Jazz Me Blues.” His solos were short and sharp, like postcards from a different planet. Then came “Singin’ the Blues.” That one stuck. “Beiderbecke doesn’t play—he converses,” wrote a Chicago critic. Melody Maker called it “the loveliest tone ever captured on record.” Louis Armstrong listened and said, “A lot of cats tried to play like Bix. Ain’t none of them play like him yet.”

Elias Parker Butler He Made the World Laugh

Elias Parker Butler

Ellis Parker Butler didn’t look like a rebel. He looked like a man who’d sell you a life insurance policy, then slip a punchline into the fine print. Born in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1869, he grew up surrounded by cornfields, Methodists, and people who thought laughter was fine—as long as it didn’t interfere with work.

Butler thought work was the joke. “The world,” he wrote, “is so full of serious people that a little nonsense is downright necessary for balance.” Another time, he said, “A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.”

He sold insurance by day and wrote stories by night, hammering them out after dinner in rented rooms and sending them to any magazine that would listen. Most didn’t. He kept writing anyway. “I write because silence makes me nervous,” he said. “And because somewhere, someone might need a good laugh more than I do.”

Then came 1905—and Pigs Is Pigs.

It was the story of a railway clerk who refused to release two guinea pigs until the buyer paid the livestock rate instead of the pet rate. The animals multiplied. The paperwork multiplied faster. Soon, the absurdity of bureaucracy had reproduced itself into immortality.