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A Town on the Cedar A young army explorer named Albert Lea led a troop of cavalry through the valley of the Cedar River in 1835. The Cedar, known originally as the Red Cedar, was the key waterway in northeast Iowa, and Lea was much impressed at what he saw. He wrote that the river is perennially supplied with pure and limpid water, and as it meanders its way for 300 miles to the Father of Waters, receiving large tributary streams, as it moves along through rich meadows, deep forests, projecting cliffs and sloping landscapes, it presents to the imagination the finest picture on earth of a country prepared by Providence for the habitation of man.' At the time of Lea's journey, Iowa was a part of the Wisconsin Territory, which had been acquired from France in 1803 as a part of the Louisiana Purchase. Land-hungry settlers could see the beauty of the territory just west of the Mississippi. They could also see its potential, and by 1846, when Iowa was admitted as a state, major communities had been established along the principal rivers. Independent farmers were claiming land, breaking the tough prairie topsoil, planting crops, and building homes. It was an ideal place for pioneers. The first white people to set up their camps in the Cedar Valley were traders and trappers, people who had no intention of settling there permanently. They sought convenient sites where they could trap near the streams and rivers, hunt in the forests, and trade with the few remaining Native Americans. Since the defeat of Chief Black Hawk in 1832, most were being driven from the territory. The first settler to look beyond a traders' camp was a Canadian-born farmer named William Sturgis. Sturgis was living in Iowa City with his wife, Dorothy Kidder Sturgis, when he heard of good land near a small waterfall a few miles from where the Cedar joined the Shell Rock River. Sturgis and Dorothy, accompanied by his sister, Catherine, and her FROM BLUE MILLS TO COLUMBIA husband, Erasmus Adams, packed their covered wagons and moved there in the spring of 1845. The men filed land claims: Sturgis chose an area on the south bank of the river near the falls, and Adams selected a spot a little farther south.2 Both couples built cabins, cleared about five acres of ground for crops, and began their new lives. Both women had babies in their new homes, and soon other families settled near them. A real community was beginning: by 1847, ten families were living near the falls, and they began to call their little town Sturgis Falk3 William Sturgis had selected the site near the falls with a larger purpose in mind. He could imagine the near future when the valley would be filled with farms. The farmers would need to have their grain milled and transported downriver to the eastern markets. The future of the town lay with the river, and he had plans for both a dam and a mill. Sturgis's plans would indeed come to fruition but not through his efforts. Such ambitious plans required money, and though he was able to construct a rough dam, he could not afford to do the job properly. The job was completed by the Overman brothers, John and Dempsey, along with their partner, John T. Barrick. The partnership of Overman and Barrick purchased the Sturgis claim in the fall of 1847, and Sturgis returned to Iowa City. Work on the mill began in earnest the next spring. Many of the growing number of settlers were employed on the project. They hollowed out the ground just south of the river and created a millrace 70 feet wide and six feet deep, which would carry water to the mill's wheels.' They soon had the first sawmill in what was by then Black Hawk County. The rough board mill was torn down in 1850 and replaced by a large, five-story stone building. The new building housed both the sawmill operation and the first gristmill in the county. The gristmill was a crude affair-the burrs had been carved from granite boulders found along the banks of the river-but it worked. Soon farmers from the length of the upper Cedar Valley and from as far away as Fort Dodge, 100 miles to the west, were driving their grain-filled wagons to the falls. As the town grew and changed, the name also changed. The first name...

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