A Poem: The Counties of Iowa

The Counties of Iowa

Published in Annals of Iowa

Volume 13, No. 8 (April 1923), Page 619

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  In the early '70's while attending school in Adel, Iowa, a teacher, Miss Mattie Ferguson, introduced to us the following composition on "The Counties of Iowa."  If she told us the name of the author it has slipped my memory, although the lines have stayed with me. I have dictated this "poem" several times in the past for publication, but in the last few months have had a number of requests for a copy. At the suggestion of our State Librarian, Johnson Brigham, I have prepared a copy for publication in the Annuals of Iowa for preservation. 

  --Almeda Brenton Harpel, 1125 Twenty-first Street, Des Moines, Iowa.

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Our home is in Iowa, westward toward the setting sun,

Just between two mighty rivers where the flowing waters run.

We have towns and we have cities; we have many 
    noble streams;

We have ninety-nine counties and now we'll say their names.

Lyon, Osceola, Dickinson, where the Spirit Lake we see,

Emmet, Kossuth, Winnebago, Worth near Lake Albert Lea.

Mitchell, Howard, Winneshiek and Allamakee shall find

Make eleven northern counties on the Minnesota line.

Clayton, Dubuque, Jackson, Clinton, together with 
    Scott and Muscatine,

Lee, Louisa and Des Moines upon the eastern line are seen.

Van Buren, Davis, Appanoose, Decatur, Ringgold, 
    Wayne we spy,

Taylor, Page and Fremont upon Missouri's border lie.

Pottawattamie, Harrison, Mills, Monona, Woodbury, 
    Plymouth, Sioux

Are all the counties around the borders of the state we view.

Next we point to O'Brien, Palo Alto, Clay, Hancock, 
  Cerro Gordo, Floyd now see,

Chickasaw   say, Fayette, Bremer, Butler, Franklin, next upon 
    the map we see.

Wright and Humboldt, Pocahontas, Buena Vista, Cherokee,

Ida, Sac, Calhoun and Webster, Hamilton with name so rare.

Next is Hardin, Grundy, Black Hawk, Buchanan, Delaware.

Jones, Linn, Benton, Tama, Marshall, Story, Crawford, 
    Carroll, Boone,

Let us not your patience weary, we will have them 
    all told soon.

Cedar, Greene, Johnson, Iowa, and Poweshiek by the same,

Next is Jasper, Polk and Dallas, names of presidential fame.

Guthrie, Audubon, and Shelby, Cass, Madison and Adair,

Warren, Marion, Mahaska and Keokuk is there.

Henry, Jefferson, Wapello, Monroe, but Washington 
    we missed.

Lucas, Union, Clarke and Adams, and Montgomery fills the list.

A Black Utopia in the Heartland -- A Good Read!

Buxton - A Black Utopia in the Heartland

by Dorothy Schwieder, Joseph Hraba 
and Elmer Schwieder

[Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2003]

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  From 1900 to the early 1920s, an unusual community existed in America's heartland: Buxton, Iowa, established by the Consolidated Coal Company. The majority of Buxton's five thousand residents were African Americans--a highly unusual racial composition for a state which was over 90 percent white. At a time when both southern and northern blacks were disadvantaged and oppressed, blacks in Buxton enjoyed true racial integration--steady employment, above-average wages, decent housing, and minimal discrimination. For such reasons, Buxton was commonly known as "the black man's utopia in Iowa."  Now, eighty years after the town's demise, this truly interdisciplinary history of a unique Iowa community remains a compelling story. 

  "This interdisciplinary study combines documentary materials with oral history to provide a vivid descriptive picture of Buxton ... The authors have provided an excellent work demonstrating the use of documentary evidence and personal interviews to reconstruct a picture of a community of the past ... of considerable value, particulary, for the areas of race relations and community studies."

  --Contemporary Sociology

  Dorothy Schwieder is professor emerita of history at Iowa State University and the author of, among many other books, Growing Up with the Town: Family and Community on the Great Plains (Iowa 2002), Iowa: The Middle Land, and Black Diamonds: Life and Work in Iowa's Coal-Mining Communities. Joseph Hraba is professor of sociology at Iowa State University, and Elmer Schwieder is professor emeritus of family environment at Iowa State University.

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Transcribed from the back cover of 

Buxton - A Black Utopia in the Heartland

The Only Dance in Iowa -- A Good Read!

The Only Dance in Iowa

A History of Six-Player Girls' Basketball

by Max McElwain

[Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004]

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  Iowa six-player girls' basketball was the most successful sporting activity for girls in American history, at its zenith involving more than 70 percent of the girls in the state. The state tournament was so popular--regularly drawing fifteen thousand fans, more than the boys' tourney--that officials declined a lucrative broadcasting offer from ABC's Wide World of Sports rather than forfeit the Iowa Girls' High School Athletic Union's control of the game. The Only Dance in Iowa chronicles the one-hundred-year history of this Iowa tradition, long a symbol of the state's independence and the people's rural pride. Max McElwain shows how, well before the passage of Title IX, in 1972, Iowa six-player girls' basketball was, as Sports Illustrated gushed, "a utopia for girls' athletics." He also demonstrates how, ironically enough, the fallout from Title IX in many ways let to six-girl basketball's demise.

  Through interviews, careful ethnography, and detailed historical analysis, McElwain exposes the intricate political, sociological, and historical dynamics of this cultural phenomenon. His book reveals how six-girl basketball, flourishing with the passionate support of Iowa's small towns, school districts, and media, came to represent the state's strong traditional beliefs and the public school system's determination to maintain its identity in the face of national educational trends. The Only Dance in Iowa is as much a study of this disappearing culture as of the game it claimed as its own.

  Max McElwain, an assistant professor of communication arts at Wayne State College, is a former sportswriter for several Midwestern newspapers.

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Transcribed from the back cover of The Only Dance in Iowa.

Love amid the Turmoil -- A Good Read!

Love amid the Turmoil

The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion

Edited by Donald C. Elder III

[Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2003]

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  William Vermilion (1830-1894) served as a captain in Company F of the 36th Iowa Infantry from October 1862 until September 1865. Although he was a physician in south central Iowa [in Iconium, Appanoose County] at the start of the war, after it ended he became a noted lawyer; he was also a state senator from 1869 to 1872. Mary Vermilion (1831-1883) was a schoolteacher who grew up in Indiana; she and William married in 1858. In this volume historian Donald Elder provides a careful selection from the hundred of supportive, informative, and heart-warming letters they wrote each other during the war.  

  Donald Elder is professor of history and chair of the department at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales.

  "What a find! This remarkable cache of Civil War letters reveals a companionate marriage of two literate, caring individuals who explore the meaning of their love and the meaning of the war that has separated them. Well illustrated and well documented, the book's pages take the reader from honesty and sensitivity to disappointment and despair. Elder proves that historical documents can be more compelling than fiction."

  --Glenda Riley, Alexander M. Bracken Professor, Ball State University

  "[These letters] make up the most complete husband-wife collection from the Civil War--most wives' letters were lost in the course of marches and battles."

  --Washington Post Magazine 

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  The above material appears on the back cover of Love amid the Turmoil.

Out Here on Soap Creek -- A Good Read!

  I am reading Out Here on Soap Creek by Inez McAlister Faber (1897-1994) [Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press, 1982].  Anyone interested in life in rural southern Iowa would enjoy this autobiography by a former Appanoose County resident.

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"Home is here on the farm with my memories."

--Inez McAlister Faber

  In 1927, Inez Faber began writing under the pen name Elizabeth Beresford. A few years later she dropped the pen name but continued to write, and for the next 25 years she wrote "A Farm Woman Speaks Up" for the Des Moines Register and Tribune and "Out Here on Soap Creek" for the Centerville Iowegian.

  This book gathers together some of Faber's columns, sprinkles them with a narrative account of her life in rural Iowa, and treats the reader to rich memories of the rural Midwest.

  Out Here on Soap Creek covers the weather, the Iowa landscape, the kind of farming practiced, the crops, the people, the animals, and the style of life in rural Iowa during the second quarter of this century. The columns tell of life on the farm, Inez and Dick's four sons, their pets, the livestock, Inez's parents and their pioneer ancestors, childhood memories and playmates, the sandpile and swing, the maple trees Inez loves, and the thrill and hard work involved in building their own home. Many of the columns included in this book involve members of Faber's family, close neighbors and friends.

  Out Here on Soap Creek is a reflection of Inez Faber's life and through these columns you will learn that her life has always been interesting. She makes these years come alive in this captivating memoir of growing into adulthood in the early part of the century.

  This book offers a chronological picture of Iowa farm life from the perspective of the woman of the family. The stories are sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious, but always touching. The experiences related are common to farm women of that ear in every part of the country.

--From the 1982 cover of Out Here on Soap Creek