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Gleanings from the Notebook of the
Itinerating Editor

from
The Dubuque Weekly Times, Thursday, December 30, 1858
Written at Anamosa, Iowa December 10, 1858. At that time, the DuBuque Southwestern Railroad was open to 3 miles north of Sand Spring(s), Delaware county.


Sand Spring School, 1893

Sand Spring village and post office, three miles south of the terminus of the Western Road, a good beginning has been made. The place is but one year old, yet contains a hundred inhabitants or more. A village of goodly size is destined to spring up there. It is in Delaware County, the other points on the way to this place are Monticello and Langworthy.
The former place reminded us of the fact that “God made the country and man made the town.”
Monticello is charmingly located on the South Fork of the Maquoketa; and its site and scenery around it are delightful. With a little taste of the denizens of the place, and a uncompromisingly and abiding hatred of whiskey; it may become one of the loveliest villages in the interior of the state. It is in Jones County.
Langworthy—an appropriate name for a station on the Dubuque Western Road and destined to perpetuate the name and memory of the noble and enterprising president of the road—has hardly made a beginning toward a village. Its site is on low ground, though not so low to make the place unhealthy. It has a post office, a small hotel and one or two stages.
The other towns/villages or indications of same, in the northern half of Jones County are Bowens Prairie, Duane, Grove Creek and Scotch Grove.
Bowens Prairie is less than a year old, we believe, yet it encompasses something like 200 inhabitants. It has grown up like Jonah’s gourd. Its inhabitants are New England people, and as full of energy and all the elements of thrift as their native hills are fill with rocks.
Omitting Anamosa in this enumeration, the other villages and foreshadows of villages in the county are Johnson, Edinburgh, Isabell, Madison, Highland Grove, Fairview, Rome and Wyoming. The last mentioned village is in the eastern part of the county and next in size to Anamosa. It contains four or five hundred inhabitants represented to be enterprising and intelligent.
In the county are five flouring mills and thirty saw mills.

Submitted by Steve Hanken

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