By Casey Jarmes | The News-Review
Once upon a time there was a small town in this county by the name of Springfield. Not to be confused with the 93 other Springfields in the United States; it’s a very generic name for a town. The Keokuk County Springfield was first settled by John Ellis in 1845 and was located in the Warren Township. The town was a stage coach stop, featuring a two room log cabin hotel that was used frequently as Americans traveled west during the 1849 Gold Rush. In 1874, a two-story school was built in the small, 200 person town. Springfield could have grown into a real town, if not for the birth of a rival just down the road: Delta.
In 1841, Andrew J. McNabb and 32 members of his extended family left Kentucky, headed for Iowa. They wintered in Washington. The next year, McNabb was among the 150 men who bought land in Warren township at $1.25 an acre. McNabb claimed his 160 acres, with his family grabbing neighboring land, amassing 900 acres, which makes up a big chunk of modern Delta. McNabb settled in the Warren Township in 1843.
In 1875, the Rock Island Railroad surveyed land for a train route between Sigourney and Oskaloosa. McNabb aproached the railroad, offering them a right of way through his property. His neighbors, Whaton and Dunn, each offered the railroad $100 and half interest on 80 acres of land if they let the train go through McNabb’s land. Rock Island agreed to travel through McNabb’s property, with a depot being built on neighboring land. A town quickly sprang up around the planned rail site, incorporating the same year. In 1876, the railroad through Delta was constructed over a one-month span.
The town was named by G.W. Fay, the chief engineer from Rock Island, who noticed that the railroad, when paired with nearby streams, created a triangle shape on maps. The uppercase version of the Greek letter Δ, pronounced Delta, is a triangle, so Fay named the town Delta.
Quickly, hundreds of people settled in the town of Delta. In its first 23 years, the town had 28 businesses, including three doctors, two hotels, seven carpenters and two coal mines. At its height, the Rock Island Railroad sent four passenger trains and a freight train through Delta every single day. Delta had two newspapers, the Delta Independent and the Delta Press. A public school was opened in Delta in 1877, beginning decades of proud Delta Bulldogs learning, playing sports, and performing music at the town’s schools. Frequently, young people drove to nearby What Cheer for entertainment at the Opera House; I found written complaints from older residents about kids being too rowdy as they returned to the town in their horse-drawn buggies late at night, evidence that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1910, the town reached its zenith, with a population of 728.
The railroad went just a mile and a half south of Springfield. This was enough to kill the town. Its population dwindled as residents and businesses moved to Delta. The last churches in Springfield closed around 1920.
The problem with being a town completely dependent on the railroad is that, after automobiles became ubiquitous and the railroad began to decline, so too did the town. Since 1910, the town’s population has steadily declined, reaching 410 by 2000 and 264 by 2020. The high school merged with Sigourney in 1966 and the elementary said goodbye to its final class in May 1974. Still, the people of Delta held onto one piece of community pride: the beloved covered bridge, located two miles southeast over the small town, built over the North Skunk River.
The bridge was a town icon for years. Infamously, in 2003, the bridge was burned down. But, that’s a story for next week.
