Ankeny: From Seven Houses to Boom Town

In eighteen seventy-four, Des Moines businessman John Fletcher Ankeny bought eighty acres of Polk County farmland just north of the capital, and the following year he platted a town along the narrow-gauge railroad he helped promote. By eighteen eighty-one the whole of Ankeny consisted of seven houses, a Methodist church, a depot, a combination store and post office, a livery stable, and a blacksmith shop. It incorporated in nineteen oh three with fewer than five hundred residents.

Then World War Two changed everything: the federal government built an ordnance plant on the edge of town to manufacture ammunition. John Deere bought that plant in nineteen forty-seven. The suburb followed: Ankeny grew from seven hundred residents in nineteen forty to more than seventy-five thousand today, one of the fastest-growing cities in Iowa, still sitting just ten miles north of the statehouse.