While working on the Tama County Board of Supervisors post back in October, I wondered if there was a comprehensive list of populations of Iowa areas by township. This agglomeration of information, including cities independent of townships, is a building block for state legislative district maps. It’s also a data set to play with, and you know how much I love playing with data sets.
The good news is, I found a 2020 census township population list, on the Iowa Secretary of State’s website. The bad news is, once I got the PDF wrangled into a sortable spreadsheet, I found a misallocation of cells right away.
This is a clip from the original PDF. My conversion of the file to a sortable spreadsheet was a multi-step process using the Zamzar file converter, lots of copying and pasting, and a dummy CSV document to create separate columns for township and county.
The order in the row is subdivision, population, total housing units, occupied housing units, vacant housing units. Carroll Township in Tama County doesn’t have a single town, but this shows 10,321 people crammed into 88 houses. Imagine the line for the bathroom.
What has clearly happened is that the population for “Carroll city, Carroll County” has jumped lines with the townships in O’Brien and Tama counties. How do we know which township should have which number? Gannett papers had an excellent database that presented census numbers in many interesting ways. It appears to have vanished from the Des Moines Register‘s website, but it’s still active at the El Paso Times. Here we can find out that Carroll Township, Tama County, had a population of 196 in 2020. (It would take a month for all of them to move to Waukee.)
The same problem appears every time an independent city has the same name as a county township in the state:
- Bloomfield (city, Davis; county, Clinton and Polk)
- Carroll (city, Carroll; county, O’Brien and Tama)
- Cedar Falls (city/county, Black Hawk)
- Clear Lake (city, Cerro Gordo; county, Cerro Gordo and Hamilton)
- Clinton (city, Clinton; county, Linn, Ringgold, Sac, Wayne)
- Danville (city, Des Moines; county, Des Moines and Worth; the five cities in Des Moines County are independent from their townships)
- Dubuque (city/county, Dubuque)
- Eldora (city/county, Hardin)
- Fairfield (city, Jefferson; 6 other counties)
- Fayette (city, Fayette; county, Decatur and Linn)
- Harlan (city, Shelby; county, Fayette and Page)
- Humboldt (city/county, Humboldt)
- Jefferson (city, Greene; 23 other counties)
- Keokuk (city, Lee; county, Wapello)
- Osceola (city, Clarke; county, Clarke and Franklin)
- Sumner (city, split across Bremer and Fayette; 5 counties, and/but for historical continuity Bremer’s is officially named Sumner No. 2 Township in census data)
- Waterloo (city, Black Hawk; county, Allamakee)
In every case, the problem can be solved by cutting the bottom-most cell in the name-set, selecting and moving the entire stack of numbers in the set down one cell, then pasting the previously bottom-most number at top in the “city” line.
The city of Carroll was separated from the townships around it in the summer of 1907, according to the July 2, 1907 Carroll Sentinel. The former Carroll Township was renamed Maple River Township. It’s not possible to know about this case on the modern DOT county map. On older ones, there was an additional “CARROLL” label in the township font. (And now I have learned that the DOT has redone its map website and the clickable drop-down lists are a little different.)
As this blog post goes live, the 2020 list with the incorrectly aligned data is still active on the SOS website. If anyone in state government is looking, hit me up and I can help you out.