Dows, Iowa

Before the railroad arrived, a small settlement called Otisville sat in this corner of Franklin County, its own post office. Then in eighteen eighty, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Falls and Northwestern Railroad platted a new townsite here and renamed everything. The new name honored Colonel W.

G. Dows, a railroad contractor. The post office switched from Otisville to Dows in eighteen eighty, and the city formally incorporated on May third, eighteen ninety-two.

That kind of erasure and renaming was typical of railroad-era Iowa, where the company's preferences routinely overrode whatever the locals had called a place for twenty years.