Cherokee, Iowa: A Town That Moved Itself

Cherokee, Iowa has a founding story that is almost entirely about transportation. The original settlement, called Old Cherokee, was planted in eighteen fifty-seven on the west bank of the Little Sioux River. When a railroad from Fort Dodge to Sioux City was announced, and it became clear that the tracks would run about a mile and a half from where people already lived, the community made a collective decision.

In the spring of eighteen seventy, they dragged houses, shops, and even the county courthouse to the new depot site. The town that assembled itself around the railroad was incorporated in April eighteen seventy-three. It developed as a wheat-shipping center on fertile prairie soil, and later became known for the state psychiatric hospital that served western Iowa for more than a century.