James D. Bourne First Settler in Clinton County

No one’s sure who got there first. Maybe it was Elijah Buell, who built a cabin on the Mississippi and drifted south before the ink on his claim dried. Maybe it was James D. Bourne, who came up the Wapsipinicon River in 1836 and never left.

The land didn’t look like a place where anyone could stay. The river bent and twisted through low timber, its banks soft with mud and cattails. Bourne stepped onto the shore and decided it would do. He built his cabin where the bend caught the morning sun.

It was a trading post for the American Fur Company at first. Coffee and powder for pelts, tobacco for tallow. A dozen faces came and went each week—trappers with frost in their beards, Native families with venison to trade, river men drifting between towns that didn’t yet exist. Bourne kept a notebook of what each man owed, though sometimes the ledger wasn’t worth the paper. He stayed anyway.

SantaCon Holiday Mayhem on Main Street

SantaCon Davenport isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for people who wake up in December, pull on a $20 Santa suit, and say, “Let’s do this.”

December 13th, 2025. Seven years running. Seven years of red polyester flooding 2nd Street like a Yuletide riot. Santas with fake beards, Santas with real ones, Santas already drunk by noon and swearing eternal love for Rudolf and the Grinch. They come from Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, the cornfields— with a thirst and a costume.

 

It started back in 2018. A handful of locals turned downtown Davenport into a North Pole fever dream. Now it’s a full-scale invasion. They move in herds, chanting, ho-ho-hoing, clinking glasses, leaving behind trails of glitter, beer foam, and unanswered questions.

 

Rules? There are rules. Wear the suit. A hat’s not good enough. Don’t die. Don’t ruin it for the rest of the Santas. Be nice to the bartenders—they control the flow of Christmas. Beyond that, you’re on your own.

Belle Plaine Witch Murder

John Geyer killed his mother with his bare hands because he thought she’d hexed his cattle. That’s what he told the sheriff. “She bewitched the herd. The voices told me to do it.”

 

Neighbors said he’d been off for months. Muttering about curses. Watching the barn at night. One man at the feed store told a reporter, “He talked about the cows like they were possessed. We thought he’d just lost money on bad hay.”

 

He was broke. The cattle were dying. His head wasn’t right.

 

One November morning, he took a lamp into the old woman’s room. The farm was quiet and cold. She was whispering spells in her sleep. The light flickered and told him to strike.

 

When the neighbors found him, he was standing over her, calm as Sunday. “It’s done,” he said.

Otto Rohwedder The Man Who Invented Sliced Bread

Otto Rohwedder spent over two decades perfecting
the invention that made sliced bread possible

Otto Rohwedder was a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa. His world was tiny gears, watch springs, precision tools. Then he walked into a bakery long enough to see the problem. Bread was sold whole, hacked into slices at home, crumbly and uneven. He thought, “There ought to be a better way.” Something mechanical that could do the job once and do it perfectly.

Around 1912, he sold his jewelry business to bankroll it, a decision most people called insane. “Bread can’t be sliced by machine,” bakers told him. “It’ll go stale before you can sell it.” Rohwedder didn’t argue. He built it anyway. His wife, Carrie, said, “He wasn’t the kind to quit when he got told no.”

He worked in a basement filled with bread crumbs and cutting tools. He measured loaf dimensions with calipers, built frames of steel, gears that turned too fast, and blades that jammed on crusts. The loaves fell apart. He added holding pins. He invented a mechanism that would slice and then clamp the bread back together until it could be wrapped. “A sliced loaf is like a family,” he said. “It needs to be held together, or it falls apart.”

Inventor Christian Nelson: He Changed The Way We Ice Cream

Christian Nelson

I once read that the best inventions come from an everyday moment of indecision. Christian Nelson saw one of those moments in his candy and ice-cream shop in Onawa, Iowa. A boy walked in, stared at a chocolate bar, then at an ice-cream cone, and said, “I want ’em both, but I only got a nickel.” Nelson thought, why not both?

He was a high-school teacher who ran a candy-shop in the summer to make ends meet. He could’ve stayed in his classroom, and never tinkered with confectionery physics, but he went home and experimented with melted chocolate and frozen vanilla ice-cream blocks. How to coat ice-cream in chocolate so the chocolate would stick, wouldn’t crack, wouldn’t slide off, wouldn’t melt in your fingers before you could enjoy it? He discovered that adding cocoa butter made the difference. He built a dipping machine, produced 500 sample bars, and handed them out at a fireman’s picnic.

He called his creation the “I-Scream Bar.” Then he found a partner, Russell C. Stover, who helped turn it from a summer side-project into something national. They renamed it “Eskimo Pie.” Before long, millions of people were being eaten. Nelson’s invention turned into a nationwide treat.

Downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa Circa 1910

Downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a birds-eye view of the Quaker Oats plant. (from a vintage postcard, circa 1910)

Washington Street Iowa City, Iowa. Circa 1910

 

Washington Street in Iowa City, Iowa. (from a vintage postcard, circa 1910)