Buxton: The Integrated Town That Iowa Built and Forgot

About fifty miles southeast of Des Moines, in Monroe County, there is almost nothing left. A historical marker. Some foundation stones under the grass. The occasional veteran of local history who drives out to look.

A hundred and twenty years ago, the town of Buxton, Iowa was one of the most remarkable communities in the United States. It was a coal-mining town, built and owned by the Consolidation Coal Company beginning in nineteen oh one. What made it unusual, extraordinary by the standards of Jim Crow America, was that it was racially integrated, by design and in practice, for most of its existence.

The company recruited Black miners from the South, particularly from Virginia and Kentucky, offering wages and housing that were unavailable to African Americans elsewhere in the region. At its peak, between approximately nineteen hundred and nineteen fifteen, Buxton had a population of around five thousand people, and African Americans made up somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of that number. The exact figures are the subject of ongoing historical research, as census records for the period are incomplete in places.

The town had Black-owned businesses, a YMCA with Black leadership, integrated schools, Black professional men, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and a company payroll that did not differentiate wages by race, which was almost unheard of in American industry at the time. Oral histories collected by Iowa historians in the nineteen seventies describe Buxton as a place where, in the memory of its former residents, people lived and worked alongside one another with a degree of normalcy that was simply not available in the surrounding Iowa towns.

The coal seams ran out. The company moved on. By the nineteen twenties, Buxton was gone, not destroyed, not burned, simply vacated and dismantled when the economic reason for it disappeared. Most of its residents scattered across Iowa's cities, including Des Moines, where their descendants still live.

The State Historical Society of Iowa has collected extensive oral histories of Buxton. It remains one of the most documented and least publicly known chapters in Iowa history.