A look back at the Avoca courthouse

The Daily Nonpareil has a feature on when Pottawattamie County had two courthouses — but, depending on how you interpret the wording of an 1886 law, maybe not two de jure county seats. Pottawattamie is the second-largest county in Iowa (954 square miles), behind Kossuth (973), which should be two counties but isn’t because of a historical trail that involves Humboldt County being compared to Poland.*

If Pottawattamie County had been divided, Avoca would have been the Belknap County seat — a “four-by-three” like Audubon or Ida** — with the line running south from the southern part of today’s Harrison-Shelby county line. That would have left 522 square miles of Pottawattamie to the west, still larger than Belknap.

*How did a copy of “History of Kossuth County, Iowa” (1913) end up at the Stanford library?
**Ida County got cheated. Move a column of townships over and Ida gets Cushing, Danbury, and all but a corner of Correctionville, and Woodbury County would still be about the size of a “five-by-four” like Tama.