Journey Home

The history of Davenport, Iowa was largely absent from my upbringing. I was born there, yet nothing. There was no Iowa history curriculum in K-12 schools, nor at university. The first biography of George Davenport, one of the city’s founders and its namesake, was not published until May 21, 2020.

I left Davenport for university in 1970 and haven’t missed learning the history. I am revisiting it now that I’m writing my autobiography.

The Trader at Rock Island: George Davenport and the Founding of the Quad Cities by Regena Trant Schantz is a serviceable biography which reflects detailed research into the history of the region. Schantz obviously reviewed documentary records, physical artifacts, and sites. It adequately tells the story of early traders, mineral extraction, land speculation, river culture, and the relations with Black Hawk and other indigenous tribal leaders from the perspective on one of history’s most prominent participants. Because of my education, this history matters little in my outlook toward my home town.

By the time my awareness came of age, the city was in a post-World War II economic boom. Depending upon how one reckons economic history, this was preceded by the trader days, land speculation, the surge in lumber milling after 1850 (as Wisconsin and Minnesota forests were clear cut and rafted down river without replanting), and the rise in farming after the Black Hawk War finished in 1832. Some of my spouse’s family were among the early Iowa settlers after the war. A tide of immigration to Iowa started by the 1840s. With the removal of indigenous tribes and native forests, along with ripping up and plowing the prairie, the landscape in which I found myself was already in existence. There was little reason to think about the early days of settlement.

By the time Mother graduated high school in 1947, the city was ready for the post-World War II boom. Settlement had grown far beyond the initial lots surveyed in the 1830s. The house in which we lived while I was in high school was built in 1910, well above the antediluvian banks of the river. There was infrastructure, a bus route, medical facilities, a wide range of churches, and corner grocery stores waiting to get displaced by supermarkets. Many large manufacturing and food processing companies existed. A person could go their whole life without knowing about the exploits of George Davenport, Antoine LeClaire and other traders turned land speculators during the time before the initial plat was laid out.

What does my writing owe to the history of the city of my birth? Not much, I reckon. It served as a landing place for ancestors displaced from other states. Grandmother arrived with children in tow during World War II. My paternal grandfather arrived after the war and didn’t live much longer.

I plan to tell the story of the initial lot sales, the lumber boom, and development of industry. I suppose that’s needed to set context. Besides the meat packing plant where my father, grandmother and I worked, I don’t have many connections to the old days. Most of our early family stories are derived from immigrant experience in Minnesota and Illinois on Mother’s side, along with Father’s ancestry in Southwestern Virginia and nearby Kentucky.

The biography of George Davenport is engaging, and of interest as an alternative to many stories of settlement in the Tidewater and New England. The Louisiana Purchase is often discussed, yet what happened locally is not. I tip my hat to the work of traders, land speculators and developers yet realize that is not my history.

I am from there, yet not of there.

A Twitch-TV streamer played Minecraft in the background as I worked on daily rushes about… coal mining. From there I descended into the mines, at least figuratively, for several hours.

My maternal grandfather mined coal in Bureau and LaSalle Counties in Illinois for at least 30 years that we know. Besides family lore and my interactions with him while young, I knew little about this aspect of his life. He was the guy from Illinois, no longer married to Grandmother, who gave me a handful of pennies each time he visited. Coal mining was a much bigger deal than I thought in the basin of the Illinois River in Central Illinois.

The Saint Paul Coal Company operated the Cherry mine in Bureau County, one of the places Grandfather worked. The company was established in Illinois in 1902 and owned two mine properties in 1909, the year of the Cherry Mine disaster in which 259 men and boys died. The mine operated on 7,217 acres of land, producing about 300,000 tons of coal annually with a daily capacity of 1,500 tons.

Because of the mining disaster, a significant amount of documentation exists, including the 96-page report on the disaster from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At this writing, the Cherry Mine disaster remains the third most deadly in American coal mining history. Grandfather first showed up as a miner on the 1910 U.S. Census in LaSalle County, old enough to have worked at the Cherry Mine during that period.

Rushes are the first draft of a section of my book. My process is to take a topic, typically a couple of paragraphs, and write rushes which will be heavily edited before being added to the draft of my autobiography. It gives me a chance to refine what I want to say without mucking up the main draft of my work. So far the process has served.

I decided the chapter about my maternal grandparents’ early days needed historical background. In a couple of ways, the mining history of LaSalle and Bureau Counties depicts a similar lure of wage work that attracted many European immigrants to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This includes my maternal great, great grandfather, who mined coal in Allegheny, Pennsylvania after arriving from partitioned Poland in the 1880s. My paternal grandfather mined coal in the early 20th Century in Southwestern Virginia, although his ancestors were well established in the United States by then.

I found a history of Saint Hyacinth’s Church in LaSalle, written on the occasion of their diamond jubilee in 1950. Established in 1875 by a community of mostly Polish and German immigrants, it is named for the saint, a Polish Dominican priest and missionary who worked to reform women’s monasteries in his native Poland in the 13th Century. The Polish exclamation Święty Jacku z pierogami! (“St. Hyacinth and his pierogi!”) is an old-time saying, a call for help in some hopeless circumstance. Pierogi was a constant topic of discussion during family visits to our relatives in LaSalle. It likely remains available there. According to family lore recorded on Ancestry.com, My great grandparents contributed to establishment of the Saint Hyacinth cemetery where they and Grandfather are buried.

I started the day’s research late morning and the next thing I knew, it was time to start dinner. It wanted pierogi, yet we had to settle for enchiladas. I’m not finished with this topic yet.