Iowa Commentary
Iowa Atlas of Historical County Boundaries
John H. Long, Editor; Peggy Tuck Sinko, Associate
Editor; Gordon denBoer, Historical Compiler; Douglas Knox, Book Digitizing
Director and Digital Compiler; Emily Kelley, Research Associate; Laura
Rico-Beck, GIS Specialist; Peter Siczewicz, ArcIMS Interactive Map Designer;
Robert Will, Cartographic Assistant
Copyright The Newberry Library 2007
The land within the present
state of Iowa was part of the Louisiana Purchase, acquired in 1803 from France.
In 1804, it was incorporated into the District of Louisiana, which was attached
to Indiana Territory. Subsequently present Iowa was part of Louisiana Territory
(1805–1812) and Missouri Territory (1812–1821). It became unorganized federal
territory when Missouri became a state in 1821, and continued so until it
became part of Michigan Territory in 1834. In 1836 present Iowa was
incorporated into Wisconsin Territory and remained there until 3 July 1838,
when Iowa Territory was created from Wisconsin Territory. The state of Iowa was
created on 28 December 1846, with its present boundaries. The maps in this
digital atlas show all of the county configurations under these various
jurisdictions.
The land that became the
state of Iowa was once part of the national public domain and, as such, was
divided for sale according to the federal rectangular survey system. Although
some of the earliest county creations and boundary changes in present Iowa were
based on river systems and arbitrary lines, lawmakers quickly recognized the
utility of basing boundaries on the survey system. Thus the Missouri
territorial legislature began incorporating range and township lines into
county boundary descriptions early in its governance of present Iowa, and that
practice has been continued by subsequent governing bodies. The lines laid down
by those early land surveyors are still in use and remain a prominent and
important feature of the modern maps used to make this atlas. Given the persistence
of the survey lines and their appearance on modern federal maps, plotting
county lines based on the land survey is easier and more precise than working
with metes and bounds descriptions that depend on ridge lines, river systems,
and local landmarks.
A few boundary lines cannot
be precisely drawn. Some involve natural features or local landmarks that are
difficult to locate, while a few reflect the vagueness and imprecision of the
laws on which they are based. Occasionally a boundary line cannot be drawn as
described, due to some oversight or error in the legislation or typographical
error in the printed statute. The legislature's intent is usually apparent in
other provisions of the law in question or in later boundary changes, and in
these cases the intent of the law—rather than a rigid interpretation of the
text—has been followed.
The Iowa state constitution
of 1857 (still in effect, as amended) stipulates that no new county can be
created containing less than 432 square miles and that no existing county can
be reduced below that size by boundary changes. The 1857 constitution exempted
from these requirements Worth County and the counties west of Worth along the
Minnesota border, which had been created in 1851 and were smaller than 432
square miles: Bancroft (eliminated in 1855), Dickinson, Emmet, Osceola, and
Winnebago (Art. XI, sec. 2). The constitution of 1846 also had the
432-square-mile requirement, but no one challenged the constitutionality of the
six counties created in 1851. An 1844 draft constitution, which accompanied
Iowa Territory's application for statehood and which was rejected by the
voters, would have required a county minimum of 400 square miles. Both the 1846
and 1857 constitutions required that all boundary changes between existing
counties be approved by the voters of each affected county in a general
election. In practice, very few boundary changes were submitted to the voters
for approval; the legislature usually altered the boundaries of existing
counties by simply defining or redefining the county boundaries.
Two cases involving these
constitutional provisions were ultimately decided by the Iowa State Supreme
Court. In 1860 the court voided an 1858 act transferring four townships from
Webster County to Humboldt County because the transfer had not been submitted
to the voters for approval. The 1857 act re-creating Humboldt had, through a
printing error, failed to include the four townships in Humboldt. An 1858
"explanatory" act had corrected the error, but the court ruled that
it was an "independent" act and did "not relate back" to
the 1857 law. Thus, according to the constitution of 1857, it was subject to
voter approval. The four townships therefore reverted to Webster County.
In the second case, an 1871
ruling, the court found the 1870 creation of Crocker County unconstitutional.
Crocker was created from Kossuth County with the same, identical boundaries as
Bancroft County, which was eliminated in 1855. While Crocker contained only 408
square miles, it was equal in size to Worth and the five counties west of Worth
(including the now-extinct Bancroft County) exempted from the constitutional
minimum of 432 square miles. The court ruled that Worth and the counties west
of it could be organized with no additional territory, but that no new
county could be created with an area less than 432 square miles. Crocker
was considered a new county and, therefore, not constitutionally acceptable.
In 1862 the legislature
provided for local initiative in altering county boundaries. If at least
one-half of the legal voters in each of the affected counties petitions their
county board of supervisors for a change, the proposed change must be presented
for a vote at the next general election. If a majority of the voters in each
affected county approve, the boundary change takes effect on the first Monday
of January following the election. Another law, approved in 1864, allows local
residents to rename their county. If one-fifth of the county's legal voters
petition their board of supervisors for a name change, the supervisors propose
a name, which the voters consider at the next general election.
Prior to Iowa statehood in
1846, both the Wisconsin and Iowa territorial legislatures immediately
“attached” newly-created counties to fully organized counties, but beginning in
1846 Iowa frequently left counties "unorganized" at creation. At a
later date, the legislature either attached them to an organized county or
fully "organized" them (i.e., made provisions for county government).
In 1847 the state legislature extended the procedure for organizing
Pottawattamie County to all unorganized counties: whenever the judge of the
judicial district in which an unorganized county was located deemed that the
"public good" required that the county be organized, he could order a
special election to select the first county officers. An 1853 law provided that
an unorganized county could be organized when a majority of the legal voters of
an unorganized county petitioned the county judge of the county to which the unorganized
county was attached, and the judge, in turn, was required to order the election
of the first county officers.
The process by which
unorganized territory was attached to organized counties changed over time,
could last for a period of several months to several years, and contained many
ambiguities. Furthermore, the precise nature of the attachments is not always
clear; in some cases the unorganized area was simply "attached" to an
existing county, but in other instances the attachments were "for
temporary purposes," "for judicial purposes," or "for
election, revenue, and judicial purposes." While it is beyond the scope of
this project to define the precise meaning of each phrase, the variations in
terminology may be important to researchers. Therefore, when the purpose of the
attachment is stated in the law, it is included in both the consolidated
chronology and the individual county chronology in quotation marks (e.g.,
"for judicial purposes"). In cases where the law gives no specific
purpose for the attachment, the phrase for administrative and judicial
purposes is used without quotation marks.
These different approaches
to creating, attaching, and organizing counties are reflected in the fact that
only 16 (including the re-created Humboldt County) of Iowa's present 99
counties were fully organized at creation and were never attached to another
county. Of the remaining 83 counties, 63 were attached to another county at
some point (17 at creation and 46 subsequent to creation). The other 20 counties
were not fully organized at creation but were subsequently organized without
ever being attached to another county.
Although territorial and
state officials generally respected Indian rights to the land and often
incorporated Indian boundary lines in county boundaries, as early as 1837 the
Wisconsin territorial legislature extended county lines in present Iowa to the
western limits of the territory. It thus anticipated the migration of
non-Indian settlers into the region well before the Sioux tribes ceded the last
Indian lands in northwestern and north-central Iowa in 1851. In this digital
atlas, the county boundaries are drawn as described in the laws, with due
regard to the Indian boundary lines when they were part of the boundary
description—but with no recognition of the gradual purchase of Indian lands by
territorial and state officials.
A boundary dispute between
Iowa and Missouri was ultimately settled by the United States Supreme Court in
1849. Missouri precipitated the controversy in 1838 when it expanded its Clark
County north of the line commonly accepted as the boundary since 1820—the
modern boundary, known since 1816 as the "Old Indian Boundary" or
"Sullivan line." Missouri's 1838 encroachment overlapped just a small
part of Iowa's Van Buren County, but in 1839 Missouri enlarged the area by
claiming a strip of land, approximately ten miles wide, north of the present
boundary, between the Des Moines and Missouri Rivers.
In 1846 Congress referred
the boundary dispute to the United States Supreme Court. The dispute hinged on
the location of the "rapids" of the Des Moines River, from which
point the northern boundary of Missouri was to run due west and to
"correspond with the Indian boundary line"—according to the Missouri
constitution of 1820. In arguing its case before the Supreme Court in 1847,
Missouri located the "rapids" of the Des Moines River approximately
ten miles north of the present boundary. Iowa contended that the
"rapids," as they were commonly recognized in 1820, were in the
Mississippi River—not the Des Moines River. Iowa's interpretation put the
boundary approximately seven miles south of the present line. In its decision
of 13 February 1849, the Supreme Court rejected both claims, asserting that
there were no actual rapids in the Des Moines River, and dismissing as
untenable Iowa's claim that the rapids in question were in the Mississippi
River. Instead, the Court chose the Indian boundary line run and marked by John
C. Sullivan in 1816, which was the commonly accepted boundary before the
dispute arose and which remains the present boundary between the two states.
In this digital atlas, only
the 1838 overlap of Van Buren County, Iowa by Clark County, Missouri is mapped,
since the boundaries of the overlap are clearly defined in a Missouri law.
However, the county overlaps implicit in Missouri's definition of its northern
boundary in 1839 and in the boundaries advocated by the two states before the
United States Supreme Court in 1847 are not mapped because the proposed
boundaries were never extended to the county level. These "implicit"
overlaps are covered in the chronologies only.
Most Iowa laws creating new
counties or altering the boundaries between existing counties took effect upon
passage of the law. In some cases an effective date was stated in the law, and
after 1855 some laws took effect after they were published in two state
newspapers (named in the law). Organization dates (i.e., the date, after
creation, when a county became fully operational and independent) for Iowa counties
are taken from two sources. Forty-two counties were organized by statute,
either at creation (16) or at a later date (26). The other 57 were organized
under the judicial procedures outlined in the 1847 and 1853 election laws.
Organization dates for those 57 counties are taken from Jacob A. Swisher,
"Organization of Counties": organization dates for 49 counties use
the date of the county's first official business; dates for 6 counties
(Dickinson, Emmet, Hardin, Monona, Sac, and Story) are the election of the
first county officers; and dates for the counties of Sioux and Winnebago are
approximate, since Swisher could find no specific date of organization.
Virtually all boundary
changes in Iowa, from its earliest days as part of the District of Louisiana to
the present, have been made by the successive legislatures that have controlled
the area. The Territorial Papers of the United States and the
territorial laws of the governments responsible for the area of present Iowa
are indispensable sources for tracing Iowa's territorial history. The session
laws for Iowa Territory, Laws of the Territory of Iowa, and for the
state, Acts and Joint Resolutions of the State of Iowa, are available in
printed volumes and in microform. These sources are supplemented by specialized
collections cited in the source citations and bibliography.