By any standard, Bettendorf, Iowa, is a fairly young city, having
awakened from its sleepy rural beginnings in the nineteenth century to
become an industrial center in the first half of the twentieth century
and, now, on the precipice of a new millennium, it is a city becoming
what is yet unrealized, but not unimagined. With more than two hundred
historic photographs, this volume offers up chapters of American history
in its stories from the heartland: a packet of seeds that started an
agricultural dynasty; a slave who took a stand for freedom and changed
the course of the nation; two brothers, one with a mind full of
innovative ideas and the other with a knack for business; a community
that would not lay down and die in the depths of the Great Depression;
and a new generation of civic leaders who took a second look at the
great river that had long flowed quietly by and found a renewed strength
in the promise of its constancy.