About 15 years after Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first flight in a powered aircraft, the Iowa City Municipal Airport opened on local farmland, where it remains today. Though its role and services have evolved since 1918 — as has flight itself — the airport continues to grow, and this weekend it’s celebrating a century of history.
Iowa City history
Posted inCommunity/News
Your Village: Who are the streets in downtown Iowa City named for?
Have a question about what’s going on in your community? Ask Little Village. Submit your questions through the Your Village feature on our homepage, or email us at editor@littlevillagemag.com.
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Keeping the faith: Iowa City’s Bethel AME Church celebrates 150 years
In a city with few remaining historic buildings and a population constantly in flux, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is a rarity. Bethel, Iowa City’s only historically black church, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. The church still stands on the same Governor Street lot its founders bought for $50 in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War.
Posted inCommunity/News
Gardens, bikes and pony rides this weekend at Lucas Farms
Plum Grove, the 1844 home of the first territorial governor of Iowa Robert Lucas and his wife Friendly, still anchors the neighborhood of Lucas Farms in Iowa City. The Lucas Farms Neighborhood Association invites the community in to explore the neighborhood’s past and present at the third annual Lucas Farms History Days.
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Church holds a century of Iowa City history, its future is part of a proposed development
The Unitarian Universalist Society Church on the corner of Iowa Avenue and Gilbert Street is turning 109 years old this year. The building, dedicated in 1908, housed the Unitarian Universalist Society of Iowa City up until they voted in February 2015 to move to new location in Coralville. Today the brick building, made to look […]
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Historic Iowa City women’s seminary paved the way toward equal access to education
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]I live in a female seminary. It’s an apartment building now, mostly remodeled, but I can imagine the history trapped between the brick walls. I sleep in the same rooms where some of the first young girls in our nation were allowed to educated themselves. I make coffee in the same spot where I imagine […]
Posted inCommunity/News, UR Here
UR Here: Cottages, conflict and control
Let’s be clear, this column isn’t about the debate over Iowa City’s Dubuque Street Civil War-era workers’ cottages that are being torn down. This is a column about how we talk about it. Acrimony on both sides of the debate has filled our local media, online venues, Planning and Zoning Commission meetings, and City Council […]
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Cultural affairs officials in Iowa struggle to find a balance between access and preservation
Tallgrass Historians L.C. is a small, Iowa City-based business specializing in the research of historical information. The company is often called on by state…
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Ten years ago in Iowa City: July 2003
Lets talk a bit about what was happening in Iowa City ten years ago. A decade is a nice chunk of time to look back upon ‘things as they were,’ and thanks to Iowa Research Online’s Archive of Little Village back issues, we’re provided with a convenient frame of reference for doing just that.
Posted inCommunity/News
IC History: Iowa City’s early crossroads
Before interstates, before pavement and even before concrete, Iowa City was becoming a major crossroads–for both the state and the nation. It began in 1839 when the Old Military Road–which got its name from the Iowa Dragoons that briefly used the thoroughfare–was built from Dubuque to Iowa City, the new territorial capitol. This first road […]
Posted inCommunity/News
IC History: Changing the channel
Most Iowa Citians don’t know how the Iowa River between the Burlington Street Bridge and northern part of City Park came to look as it does, nor that the channel once followed a very different course through the city. Would one know what was underfoot while walking along its banks or viewing it from afar? Who remembers the islands in the river, the quarries along its banks or the changes in 1939 that made them disappear?
