Iowa at statehood, 1846 (Flickr)
It seems like most of Iowa’s county histories are ever only organized by individual county. This provides good detail for each separately, but hurts when you are trying to think of the “big picture” of Iowa’s westward expansion.
I was going to fill in that gap, creating a timeline of when counties were created, county seats named, and so forth, only to find a pleasant surprise: It’s been done. The writer found sources and legislative acts specifying each date a county was created or changed.
There’s no need for me to duplicate that work, so I’ll have to change my focus. A timeline just of county seats will be about as informative.
Bonus: In searching for an image for this blog entry, I found a couple of maps that show one of the proposed but not approved state boundaries, the one that went into Minnesota but not to the Missouri River. More research on that later.