Bettendorf: A Town That Renamed Itself for a Factory

The city you are passing through was not always called Bettendorf. After eighteen fifty-eight, this stretch of the Mississippi bluff was a modest community named Gilbert, after an early landowner. Everything changed when two brothers arrived.

William and Joseph Bettendorf founded their axle company in Davenport in eighteen ninety-five, and two fires in nineteen oh two destroyed the plant. The fires came on January twenty-eighth and again in May. The residents of Gilbert raised fifteen thousand dollars, bought up farmland between the river and the railroad tracks, and lured the brothers to relocate.

The Bettendorf brothers accepted. William's most important invention was a one-piece cast-steel railroad truck frame that eliminated the loose bolts that caused delays and derailments across the country. William was born in Mendota, Illinois, in eighteen fifty-seven, and in eighteen seventy-eight he had invented a power lift sulky plow that let a farmer raise the plow with a lever while seated.

The plant grew fast. It became a major producer of steel castings. The workforce grew from about three hundred in nineteen oh three to about eight hundred by nineteen ten, the year William died, a week after emergency surgery and just before his family was to move into a twenty-two acre estate.

The four hundred forty residents of Gilbert were so grateful they petitioned to rename their town in the brothers' honor. In nineteen oh three, Gilbert became Bettendorf.