Casey, Iowa: Named for the Contractors Who Built the Line

Casey, Iowa takes its name not from a person who lived here, but from the Erie, Pennsylvania firm that built the railroad through this stretch of prairie. John and James Casey, Contractors, were the crew chiefs responsible for laying the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific tracks across Iowa between eighteen sixty-six and eighteen sixty-nine. On January twelfth, eighteen sixty-nine, an Irish railroad foreman formally platted the town at the point where the line crossed the Adair and Guthrie county line.

The town was a stop in the middle of a stretch that felt like nowhere, sitting between the small town of Adair and the larger depot town of Stuart just a few miles east. Like so many small Iowa towns born from the railroad era, Casey grew steadily for a few decades and then stabilized, today a community of just under four hundred people along the old Rock Island corridor.