Iowa : The Home for Immigrants

In 1870 the Iowa Board of Immigration published

Iowa : The Home for Immigrants being a Treatise on the Resources of Iowa and Giving Useful Information with Regard to the State, for the Benefit of Immigrants and Others (digitized by Google)…pheww, they weren’t afraid of long titles.

This 96 page guide was printed in English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Holland (Dutch).

Some interesting tidbits:

From the Climatology data p. 90, “The year 1863 was very cold, not only in Iowa, but throughout the country, and there was a frost in every month of the year.”

From A word to the landless in p. 68, “There is still in Iowa uncultivated land enough for three hundred and sixty thousand farms, of eighty acres each!”

The guide also mentions that there was still a quarter-million acres of government land available for homestead in the northwest portion of Iowa (p. 57).

There are plenty of other fun facts in this book, including sections on agriculture, state institutions, railroads, government lands, and variety of statistical information. A fun book to browse through, and it gives a good impression of what Iowa was like, or at least what we wanted immigrants to think it was like, in the late 1800’s.