Coulter, Iowa

Coulter is a small city in Franklin County, Iowa, born in the eighteen eighties when the Chicago and Great Western Railway laid tracks through this stretch of north-central Iowa. Like Latimer and other small Franklin County towns, Coulter grew up along the rail line, part of a cluster of small communities that owe their existence to the era when railroads were threading the Iowa prairie. The town has stayed small, a couple of hundred residents surrounded by cornfields, a reminder of how the railroad once decided which dots on the map would become towns and which stretches of farmland would stay empty.