IOWA - Portrait of the Land - A Century of Change: 1800 to 1900

Michigan lily

A Century of Change:
1800 to 1900

Prairie racerunner

In the 1800s, Iowans reworked the face of their new state with a speed and to an extent perhaps unparalleled in human history. At the beginning of the century, a blanket of prairie cloaked three-quarters of this "land between two rivers." Pothole marshes dotted the flatter north-central part of the state, while a network of streams laced the rolling hills elsewhere across Iowa. Dense forests engulfed some valleys in the east and groves of bur oaks climbed out of the river corridors and onto the ridges to form savannas. Thousands of Native Americans lived on the land, harvesting wild plants and animals, growing crops, and occasionally managing the vegetation with fire. By 1900, however, Euro-American settlers had claimed nearly all of Iowa's 36 million acres as farmland.

Non-Indian settlement officially began on June 1, 1833, when pioneers first were allowed to claim new land in the 6-million-acre Black Hawk Purchase along the west side of the Mississippi River. By 1846, when Iowa became a state, census records listed 96,088 people. The population doubled to 192,914 by 1850 and topped one million before 1870. In 1900, Iowa had 2.2 million people, compared to 2.9 million people today. Most lived on the state's 200,000 farms, working land where 95 percent of the prairie, two-thirds of the woodlands, and most of the wetlands had been converted to agriculture.

Rochester Cemetery, in Cedar County, is one of the Midwest's botanical showplaces. Historic gravestones nestle in the largest remnant of prairie remaining in the county. Scattered large oaks and hills of dune-sand add to the site's natural history. Photo by Photographic Services, University of Iowa.

The earlier settlers may have preferred to stay close to forest edges, where they could cut trees for building materials, fences, and fuel. But the lack of trees on the expanses of prairie only briefly delayed the rush of settlement to the more open lands of northwest Iowa. Especially after the Civil War, there was a major push onto the prairies. And once the farmers came to an area, it took less than ten years for the "frontier" to become agricultural land.

Most of the prairie sod was turned under with oxen and breaking plows and later with steel plows. The remainder disappeared in the face of heavy grazing and competition from introduced grasses. Farmers also suppressed fires, which once had discouraged woody plants and alien species from invading the prairies. The few prairie remnants that survived often were wet areas that had been used to harvest wild hay. Many of those sites later would be doomed by dredges and tiling machines that made drainage easier, and also by continuing pressure in the twentieth century to cultivate more land.

In his painting Fall Plowing, renowned Iowa artist Grant Wood focused on the geometric patterns that cultivation brought to the land, and he highlighted the implement of change - the plow. Wood captured the steeply rolling hills of southern and eastern Iowa farmland. Courtesy of the Deere Art Collection, Moline, Illinois.

The dramatic, swift, almost complete change of diverse prairie to a monoculture of cropland profoundly altered the ecosystem. Twenty-eight million acres of bluestem, dropseed, compass plants, coneflowers, gentians, and 200 other species were transformed, in a relative eyeblink, into a patchwork of corn, wheat, oats, hay, and pasture. Those plots have expanded to the huge roadside-to-roadside corn and soybean fields that we see today.

At the same time, although to a lesser degree, the loss of forests also reshaped the state's landscape. Naturalist Bohumil Shimek described Iowa's pre-settlement forests: "There were still miles upon miles of almost undisturbed timber, fine white oaks predominating on the uplands, the hard maple occasionally dominating the river bluffs, and the red cedar finding an anchorage on the limestone ledges, while the black walnut and various softwood trees occupied the narrow bottom lands. The upland woods were carpeted in early spring with hepaticas and the rue anemone, while the ravines were decked with beautiful ferns, interspersed with pink and yellow ladies'-slippers and many other wild flowers, all in great profusion."

Early surveyors' notes suggested that trees covered about 6.7 million acres or 19 percent of Iowa around the time of statehood in 1846. Settlers steadily cleared the forests, however, as they grubbed out trees for cropfields, rail fences, log buildings, and lumber. By 1857, the Iowa State Agricultural Society had issued a plea calling for more careful use of timber resources. Steamboat crews, who regularly stopped to cut trees to burn for fuel, decimated some forests along major rivers.

Source: Vegetation Maps of Iowa 1832-1859,
from Government Land Office Township Plat Maps,
Iowa State University.

Source: Compiled from Landsat Thematic Mapper
satellite imagery, Iowa Dept. of Natural Resources.

Maps above: The dramatic, swift, almost complete change of diverse prairie
to a monoculture of cropland profoundly altered the native ecosystem.

Boat decks were stacked with cordwood. When railroads came to Iowa in 1855, they brought another assault on the woodlands. The state's eventual 10,000 miles of rail lines needed about six acres of oak woods, perhaps 800 trees, to make ties for every mile of track. What's more, those ties usually had to be replaced every five to seven years. Railroad cars, trestles, and fuel for some steam engines also required wood from the forests.

Often, trees grew back rapidly after they were cut. But with the invention of barbed wire in 1873, the forests faced another threat, as farmers found it easier to use woodlands for grazing. Although the livestock didn't always destroy the forests, the animals compacted the soil, ate or trampled seedlings, and changed the character of the woodland community. Coal mining also took its toll on forests as trees were cut to shore up mine shafts. By 1900, more than 4 million acres of Iowa's original forests had been lost to other uses.

Riverboats carried settlers into the country's interior. The steamboats burned enormous amounts of wood, cut from the timber along Iowa's river valleys. This image was printed from an engraving on lithographic limestone quarried in Floyd County and published in Clement Webster's 1915 issue of Contributions to Science to illustrate the high quality of this Iowa stone for printing.

As much as they cut trees, however, nineteenth-century Iowans liked to plant them. Many farmers started windbreaks and shelterbelts around their farmsteads for shade and protection from the prairie winds. As people controlled wildfires, and with roads and fields as firebreaks, tree growth expanded into what once had been grasslands. When cities grew, urban residents also planted trees along streets, around houses, and in parks.

Still, Iowa was, and is, known more for its prairies than its trees. Especially in north-central and northwest Iowa, in the tracks of the most recent glaciers, a labyrinth of prairie marshes dotted the pre-settlement terrain. Ducks and geese, even trumpeter swans and whooping cranes, abounded in the wetlands. Muskrats, turtles, dragonflies, small fish, frogs, salamanders, marsh wrens, yellow-headed blackbirds, and other wildlife shared the potholes.

Beneath those waters full of abundant wildlife, however, lay some of the richest land on earth, a fact not lost on the pioneers who settled there. Farmers quickly tried to find ways to drain off the water so they could plant crops or harvest prairie hay. They first dug ditches by hand, then cut trenches with horse-drawn plows. Some fashioned wooden pipes, which later were replaced with clay tiles. By any means they could, the industrious farmers shuttled the water off their land to the nearest river or stream.

This remarkable 1850 New Map of Iowa illustrates the wave of change moving across the state from east to west in the middle of the nineteenth century. The eastern counties are bustling with township lines, numerous settlements, stagecoach roads, named rivers and streams, and the state capital at Iowa City. The western counties are not as well known, and some of their names did not stick - Buncombe, Risley, Yell, and Fox. "Indian Territory" lies west of the Missouri River. Note "Ft. Clark" and "Ft. des Moines" and the "site of Monroe, the new capital" in Jasper County. The terrain of the "Coteau des Prairies," the high ground of pothole wetlands that track the route of the last glacier through the eastern Dakotas, is noted extending into north-central Iowa.

In the process, people transformed the sponge-like character of the land, where water once had soaked into the ground. The farmers' artificial drainage ditches began to expand, forming water courses that grew and eroded with more runoff. New tile lines diverted more water to the channels. Steam dredges cut drainage canals to further speed the water away. In place of flat land dappled with standing water, there developed a watershed with rivulets and creeks and streams and rivers. Instead of seeping gradually into the land, the water was hurried away downstream through a new network of surface connections.

Elsewhere in Iowa, landowners often shortened or altered rivers. On the more rolling land, thousands of miles of rivers and streams had developed over thousands of years, as water found its way gradually downstream to the sea. If those sometimes-meandering rivers ran where people wanted to put farm fields or highways or other structures, engineers frequently used machines to straighten, or channelize, the waterways. The process started in the late 1800s but reached its peak in the early 1900s, after heavy equipment became more common. By some estimates, Iowa lost more than 3,000 miles of streams to channelization before government restrictions curtailed the practice. Channelization also sped the flow of floodwaters onto the land of downstream neighbors, lowered the water table, and encouraged the drainage of some lakes, sloughs, and river backwaters.

This historic photograph shows a ledge of dolomite bedrock breaking the flow of the North Fork Maquoketa River at Cascade in Dubuque County. The natural outcrop forms the base for a low-head dam that supplied water power for the adjoining mill. Photo from the Calvin Collection, University of Iowa.

In 1886, an unexpected gush of water, known as Jumbo, flowed out of control for months during well drilling at Belle Plaine in Benton County. There is a continuing need to locate adequate sources of good-quality groundwater throughout Iowa. Photo from the Calvin Collection, University of Iowa.

Even before Europeans began their nineteenth-century push to settle here, earlier miners had discovered some of Iowa's mineral resources. By the mid-1600s, French voyageurs and Native Americans were working lead mines along the Upper Mississippi River. Revolutionary War soldiers made bullets from lead mined at Dubuque. In 1788, Julien Dubuque settled in what is now Dubuque County near the mouth of Catfish Creek and negotiated mining rights with the Meskwaki. Lead and zinc mining would continue for more than a century, with the last mine closing in 1910.

Some of the state's earliest explorers were government geologists sent to assess the mineral resources. Although they may have been disappointed not to find tremendous mineral wealth, these scientists still made valuable observations on the state's natural resources and topography.

Gypsum was discovered in Iowa in the 1850s. Horse-drawn carts were used to haul slabs of gypsum from this quarry just south of Fort Dodge in 1902 for use as building stone and for mortar and plastering purposes, and later for the manufacture of wallboard. Photo from the Calvin Collection, University of Iowa.

One discovery that did bring major changes was coal. Federal survey crews first reported coal deposits along the Mississippi River in 1835. Settlers began digging shallow "dog holes" to mine coal for home use, and by 1840, a few miners were extracting coal to sell. Steamboats occasionally burned coal, but it was the railroads that spurred the demand for coal in the late 1800s, as tracks pushed across the state and the country. For a time, Iowa was the last stop where the coal-burning locomotives could load a supply of fuel for the trip west. From 1874 until 1900, Iowa produced more coal than any other state.

Especially in south-central Iowa, some strip pits left moonscapes of barren tailings and water-filled excavations where miners had dug out the coal from just below the surface. Another 6,000 abandoned underground mines lie beneath about 80,000 acres of land at several sites. Some of the old mines occasionally still collapse, leaving craters and damaging property. Several old mine shafts lie just east of the Iowa Statehouse, in Des Moines.

Structures that housed underground coal mining operations were familiar scenes in south-central Iowa at the close of the nineteenth century when mining activity was near its peak. Coal fueled the expansion of railroads, industry, and home heating. The mining industry also attracted many immigrants to Iowa from other countries and states. Pictured here is the Consolidation Mine No. 8 near the former town of Givin in Mahaska County. Photo from the Calvin Collection, University of Iowa.

As the push to develop the state accelerated, people quickly learned that Iowa's bedrock often makes good building material. From the Old Capitol, built of limestone in the territorial capital of Iowa City in 1840, to the Iowa Men's Reformatory, constructed in Anamosa starting in 1872, many stone buildings have become landmarks. The building-stone quarries were concentrated in eastern Iowa, but an outcrop of Iowa's oldest exposed bedrock, the Sioux Quartzite, at the far northwest tip of Iowa, has been used in a number of buildings in that region.

The Bealer Quarries in Cedar County, photographed here about 1900, were famous for their mechanization and output of stone for bridge piers and abutments. Many of Iowa's nineteenth-century bridges and buildings were built of limestone found outcropping along major rivers. Photo from the Calvin Collection, University of Iowa.

With the constant need for more building materials, manufacturers of clay product also sprang up across Iowa. By 1900, 381 companies were making bricks, drainage tile, and sewer tile. The turn-of-the-century push to drain and farm wetlands would make Iowa the leading producer of drainage tile by 1920.

Draining the wetlands, plowing the prairie, clearing the forests, and mining the land also destroyed or significantly altered the habitat for wildlife that once lived there. Our wildlife populations declined dramatically through the nineteenth century. The first white explorers marveled at the bison, elk, wild turkeys, deer, prairie chickens, bears, wolves, waterfowl, shorebirds, and other birds and animals that thrived in the fertile prairies and scattered woodlands. "I had never rode through a country so full of game," declared Joseph Street, an Indian agent who traversed the Turkey, Wapsipinicon, and Cedar rivers in northeast Iowa with a survey party in 1833.

Kilns, sheds, and neat stacks of finished clay tiles are seen at the Iowa Pipe and Tile Company plant in Des Moines about 1896. The plant relied on outcrops of clay shale nearby along the Des Moines River. Miles of tile were used to drain the natural wetlands of north-central Iowa for agricultural use. Photo from the Calvin Collection, University of Iowa.

The first non-Indian settlers killed game almost at will. They easily took deer, turkeys, and prairie chickens for food. In wetlands, people gathered duck, goose, and swan eggs in the spring and shot the birds virtually year-round for food and feathers. Market hunters also slaughtered shorebirds and waterfowl by the hundreds, often shipping the birds to restaurants in eastern cities.

River otters and beavers initially thrived in most rivers, streams, and marshes, and trappers sought them for fur during the heyday of the fur trade in the late 1700s. During the nineteenth century, trapping pressure, habitat loss, water pollution, wetland drainage, and stream channelization gradually took their toll. Beavers and otters were essentially gone from Iowa around 1900.

The combination of hunting, a growing human population, and the conversion of prairies and forests and wetlands to farm fields spelled doom for many species. By 1867, the last Iowa mountain lion had been killed. Bison vanished from the state in 1870, elk in 1871, black bears in 1876, wolves about 1885, and whooping cranes by 1894. Passenger pigeons were mostly gone from Iowa by the 1890s, and they would become extinct by 1914.

It was a time of transition. In the nineteenth century, we changed our state from a place controlled by natural forces to a landscape dominated by human handiwork. A pioneer child might have ridden in a covered wagon on a trackless prairie, watching elk and prairie chickens. That same person could have greeted the twentieth century with a ride behind a steam locomotive, on tracks linking urban industrial centers, passing neat farmsteads built on a mile-square grid of roads.

Incredibly, this astounding transformation from a natural landscape of wild places teeming with wild creatures to a checkerboard of manicured cropfields, cities, and roads, took place in barely sixty to seventy years, less than a lifetime.