On Friday, Feb. 12, 1875, shortly before 10:30 p.m., “one of the most brilliant meteors of modern times illuminated the entire State of Iowa, and adjacent parts of the States of Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.”
“The meteor, in rapidly moving through the atmosphere, produced a great variety of sounds — rolling, rumbling, and detonations of fearful intensity — which in a large portion of Iowa County shook the houses as if moved by an earthquake,” Gustavus Hinrichs wrote in Popular Science Monthly later that year.
Over Iowa County, the meteor “produced three terrific detonations, which shook the buildings for miles around” and could be heard 150 miles away, Hinrichs wrote.
Hinrichs was one of the country’s leading scientists, known for his contributions in fields ranging from mineralogy to astronomy. He created world-renowned chemistry and physics labs at the University of Iowa, where he taught for over 25 years. Hinrichs also built his own observatory, and in the same year the meteor lit up the nighttime sky, he established the Iowa Weather Service, the first state weather bureau in the country. The Danish-born scientist paid for both out of his own pocket, because neither the university, which had decided to no longer emphasize science, nor the Iowa Legislature would fund them.
Hinrichs estimated the explosion of the meteor scattered meteorites over an 18 sq. mile area in Iowa County, with more falling on adjacent counties. (It’s a meteor in the air; the bits that hit the ground are meteorites.) Sometimes called the Amana meteor for the nearby Amana Colonies, it is also known as the Homestead meteor, because Homestead was the nearest village with a train station.
It was at that train station that “meteor-brokers” set up shop to sell scavenged bits of the “detonating meteor.” The meteor’s spectacular appearance and enormous explosion made international news. Museums around the country and in Europe were eager to add Homestead meteorites to their collections, as were many non-scientists.
The meteor-brokers in Homestead typically charged $2 per pound for meteorites and rocks that looked like meteorites. At the time, the average daily wage in the United States was about $2.25.
“Enormous profits were made, creating a ‘meteor excitement’ in the region,” Hinrichs noted. He estimated that by the end of June, 400 pounds of fragments from the meteor had been collected.
The first meteorite collected was called the “Sherlock stone,” because it was found on the property of a man with the surname Sherlock, but this created some confusion. A 1927 article in the journal Science complained that some museum catalogs still called the 1875 Iowa County meteorites Sherlock stones, regardless where they were found.
Hinrichs made several trips to Iowa County to study the impact of the meteor, and collected meteorites for a collection UI still has. The university didn’t pay for them — Hinrichs did with the help of John Irish, the publisher of the Iowa City Press, a weekly newspaper that eventually became the Press-Citizen.
Four years after the last one, there was another spectacular meteor fall in Iowa, this time near the northwestern town of Estherville in Emmett County.
May 10, 1879, was a quiet Saturday in Estherville when suddenly a massive “brilliantly white” object appeared in the cloudless sky. A few moments later there was “a terrible sound resembling the crack of a great cannon, the crack of doom or some other unusual rattle,” Estherville’s Northern Vindicator reported. It was the meteor exploding, with meteorites falling over a wide area. According to the newspaper, “the explosion shook houses.”
The largest piece of meteor slammed into a farm field about three miles north of the city. The 437-pounder burrowed 14 feet into the ground. A local well digger had to be hired to help extricate it.
Hinrichs was the first scientist on site, according to the Vindicator, paying his own way again with “the regents of his University viewing the matter with indifference.” The paper noted with some local pride that after Hinrich examined a large meteorite, he called it “a rare specimen.”
Fifty years after impact, Estherville erected a roadside marker near where the 437-pound meteorite fell. More recently, it has unveiled a statue commemorating the meteor, and opened the Estherville Meteorite Center.
As for Hinrichs, in 1905 he published a 118-page booklet on the Amana meteorites. By that time, he was living in Missouri, having gotten fed up with lack of support for, and occasional hostility to, both him and science in Iowa.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2025 issue.
