Conover: Where Cargill Began

Conover, Iowa is a ghost town in Winneshiek County, but its brief and spectacular life seeded one of the largest private companies in American history. In September eighteen sixty-four, word spread that a railroad was coming through this valley. Within two weeks the village was platted, and by the next year it had more than two hundred buildings, including thirty-two saloons.

At its peak the town held fifteen hundred people. The collapse came just as fast: the depot moved to nearby Calmar, a fire destroyed much of the town in eighteen sixty-nine, and Conover vanished. But in eighteen sixty-five, a young grain dealer named William Wallace Cargill, who had come from Janesville, Wisconsin, opened a grain warehouse here beside the tracks.

He later moved operations, brought in his brothers, and built the company that became Cargill, Incorporated, today one of the largest agricultural trading and food companies in the world, with revenues exceeding a hundred billion dollars annually.